No surprises here: Boston physician Jill Stein bested second runner (and former sitcom star) Roseanne Barr by a 41 percent margin, winning 193.5 of a total 294 delegates. (One delegate was apparently split between Stein and a third candidate.) Stein, who ran against Romney in the 2002 Massachusetts gubernatorial election and won 3 percent of the vote, is running on a platform centered on her Green New Deal, an ambitious plan that would guarantee full employment of all Americans at a living wage, develop a green economy based on renewable energy sources, tax banker bonuses at a 90-percent rate, and legalize marijuana.

In her acceptance speech Saturday afternoon, Stein railed against a two-party system that she says offers little in the way of alternatives. The U.S. is “at the breaking point, for our people, for our economy, for our democracy, and for our planet,” she said.

Stein’s vice-presidential running mate will be Cheri Honkala, who ran for sheriff in Philadelphia in 2011. In her acceptance speech, Honkala talked about being a homeless, single mom in Minnesota. After she lost her apartment, she and her son lived in her car, then, when a drunk driver totaled that car, sought refuge in an abandoned house during winter. The Green Party, with its promises of jobs and health care for all, was a natural fit for her and her values.

“We are the new and unsettling force that Martin Luther King spoke for,” Honkala said.

Stein and Honkala addressed a crowd of a few hundred delegates crowded into the Chesapeake Room of the Holiday Inn on Baltimore’s Lombard Street. Representatives from all 50 states were there, including one delegate from Hawaii with a Chester A. Arthur-like beard who insisted the state was a sovereign nation. A majority of the crowd appeared to be middle-aged, although there were also college-age activists, like University of Wisconsin-Madison occupier Leland Pan.

The group slow-clapped to quiet the room, while delegates signaled their collective approval with the phalange-waving charm of spirit fingers. One speaker addressed them not as “fellow Americans,” but as “brothers and sisters.”

This, after a Friday night Green Party bash at an art and music venue in Baltimore’s Station North arts and entertainment district. Some 75 convention-goers enjoyed the musical stylings of eco-conscious band Woven Green, whose lead singer, Ashley Cash, sported frilly boots and an Earth-child headband. It was like an urban All Good Festival with booze, T-shirts for auction, and an arm-waving elderly man with a white ponytail who, given enough liquid lubricant, could have bested Beyonce in a “Single Ladies” dance-off.

But this was no Arab Spring. Even the Occupy movement was scarcely visible, save for a delegate from Delaware who demanded a mic check to quiet the room on Saturday, then led everyone in a “banks got bailed out, we got sold out” chant.

For a fledgling party, this year represents a small step forward. The Greens qualified for federal matching funds for the first time, but while party leaders can rile up a crowd of like-minded insiders, they seem woefully naïve when it comes to the politicking needed to build a national coalition and convince others outside the base to join in.

“The biggest challenge for any Green Party in any country is messaging,” said Richard Leckinger, a member of the Green Party leadership in New Zealand, where the Greens own 14 of 120 total seats in Parliament, making them third in terms of party representation. (Leckinger decided to attend the convention after realizing it coincided with a visit to his mother for her 80th birthday.) “You have to learn to talk to voters. I’m not sure the U.S. Greens are there yet,” he told me.

Of course, the Kiwis’ mixed-member, proportional electoral system, where people vote for both a party and a member of parliament, guarantees political parties seats in parliament even if they don’t win any electorate seats, but do win at least 5 percent of the party vote. (Still confused? Watch this video.)

Contrast that to our nation’s winner-take-all system, where a candidate with just 50.1 percent of the popular vote snags all a state’s electoral college votes, and the Green Party — which isn’t even currently tracked on Gallup’s 2012 election page — has a lot of work to do if it expects to have any impact on national politics.

Stein’s name is on the ballot in just 21 states right now, and her campaign lacks the money to purchase television advertisements. (The Green Party has no uber-rich super PACs.) She told the Boston Globe she’ll run a “traditional campaign,” traveling from state to state, and is counting on social media to spread the word about her candidacy.

Still, none of this seemed to matter Saturday. When Stein walked down the center aisle, assumed her place behind the lectern, and thundered in spite of her delicate frame, “This is the year we take our country back,” a Boeing 747’s worth of people rose to their feet in a standing ovation.

Now, if only some network other than C-SPAN had had its cameras rolling.

The Green Party came cruising into Baltimore on Thursday — er, wait, came riding into Baltimore. No. Had party members been able to walk and ride bicycles into Baltimore, I’m sure they would have, but even presumptive presidential nominee Jill Stein found herself riding in a jumbo jet in order to get here in a timely fashion.

But they made it nonetheless, and here they’ll stay for the next three days, holding workshops, fundraisers, and nominating their candidate for the highest office in the land. Barring any magical Roseanne Barr love-fest tomorrow at the nominating convention (the former sitcom star also tossed her hat in the ring), it will be Stein’s name on the ballot in, more than likely, 45 states by November.

In some ways it seems fitting that the Green Party chose Charm City as the location for its presidential nominating convention. Baltimore is sometimes forgotten to its bigger cousins, Washington, D.C., and New York City. It’s often seen as quirky and eccentric. And it’s easily stereotyped by the images we see in popular culture. (No, not every block is straight out of The Wire.)

Welcome to the Green Party, hanging on the heels of the Republican and Democrat parties, populated by an array of disparate interest groups, and written off by state election boards as unserious, tree-hugging, dove-releasing, organic-farming, grass-fed beef-ing … you get the point.

Stein, a Boston physician who was inspired to take up politics by environmental health epidemics, is perhaps a more mainstream candidate than the party has put forward in recent years. But still, it seems that nary a story can pass through the national media without the specter of her most prominent predecessor hanging overhead. Here’s the Times, yesterday:

While Ms. Stein barely registers a blip in national polling, experts point to Ralph Nader, the Green Party nominee in 2000, who was seen by many Democrats as siphoning just enough votes from Al Gore in one state, Florida, to tip the election to the Republican, George W. Bush. Nationally, Mr. Nader had captured only 3 percent of the vote.

Could such a situation unfold again?

Stein brushes off these fears. “We have 10 years of experience with muzzling ourselves politically, and it’s very clear now that silence has not been an effective political strategy,” she said in an interview with Grist earlier this year. “The politics of fear in fact has delivered all those things that we were afraid of.”

“The challenge for us is overcoming conventional communications, which is corporate-sponsored and would like to keep us down and out,” Stein told me in an interview Thursday night. “The political system is very engineered to silence any opposition party that’s not the corporate-controlled, big Wall Street power.”

Certainly the Green Party has made strides. For the first time in its 11-year existence, it has qualified for matching funds from the feds, up to donations of $250. Spirits have been buoyed by the Occupy movement that exploded onto the national media scene last fall, which was, to a large degree, a physical embodiment of the political philosophy of Greens: health care for all, forgiveness of college student debt, employment for everyone, an emphasis on environmentalism and green jobs, a reformed pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants. Oh, and, legal weed.

“Everybody’s worried about a job, paying their college debt,” said Stein, who chose anti-poverty advocate Cheri Honkala to be her vice-presidential running mate. “This movement is vibrant and strong and unstoppable.”

Stein believes many people agree with Greens, and doesn’t understand, for instance, why banks get bailed out and students don’t. “A political campaign provides another rallying point for this very pent-up, frustrated energy that we can do better and the current system isn’t providing it,” she says. “It’s like a pressure-cooker now, and it needs an outlet.”

Whether that outlet is the Green Party, and whether people will be willing to cast their votes for Stein with the ghost of Ralph Nader – and the very real Mitt Romney — lurking about, remains to be seen. Perhaps, at the very least, her presence will prod President Obama to pay a little more heed to members of his “base” who might be tempted to jump ship. (In the last month, Obama has skipped both the Earth Summit and the national convention of the NAACP.)

This weekend in Baltimore may offer some hints as to what the coming months hold. The Greens have been hosting a series of workshops these first two days, about the Green New Deal, the green economy, and how to get money out of politics. Tonight they’ll throw a fundraiser at an art gallery and music venue in the city’s Station North arts and entertainment district. (Cover charge: $20.) Tomorrow will bring a string of speeches from national thinkers and activists, including 2008 vice-presidential nominee Rosa Clemente, and nominating speeches from Stein and Barr.

The turnout thus far would make anyone look askance at setting up more than two rows of chairs in a tiny press room, but organizers say there are 250 registered delegates, and expect up to 400 people to attend the convention.

As to why the Green Party picked Baltimore, Stein assured me that “a lot of thought” went into the decision. Something about a strong Green Party in the city. But if it’s here, it’s well hidden — or perhaps it’s just composed mostly of photosynthesis-loving organisms. The Maryland State Board of Elections revoked the party’s space on the state ballot last year because the Greens had failed to win 1 percent of the vote in the most recent election. Party members are now trying to collect the 3,000 signatures required to get back on the ballot.

Broadly, what’s happened is that both parties now perceive, accurately, that the public is pro-energy. That’s why both parties are grappling for the “all of the above” slogan.

“Pro-energy,” in the U.S. public’s case, means pro more energy, cheaper energy, cleaner energy, and more secure energy. What the public does not like is the trade-offs between those goals. It doesn’t like hearing that it has to give anything up. It doesn’t like hearing about “anti-energy” penalties and prohibitions. And it never likes favoritism, waste, fraud, or generic “spending.”

Given that all energy policies involve trade-offs between various desiderata, a political party’s ability to sell an energy policy to the public hinges on its ability to evoke the right frames. More/cheaper/cleaner/safer energy always polls well. Restraints, added cost, pollution, and foreign-ness (especially Middle Eastern-ness) do not.

This basic dynamic helps explain why Mitt Romney is not dropping Solyndra. Conservatives still see it as one of their bests attacks on Obama. It evokes Big Government spending, cronyism, waste, and failure (i.e., less energy). It tars the rest of Obama’s clean-energy programs, nay his entire agenda, by association.

The dynamic also explains why the right is going after Obama for allegedly (though not actually) leaving coal and other fossil fuels out of his energy strategy. They don’t want him to capture the pro-energy label. “All of the above,” says Romney, means that Obama is “for all sources of energy that come from above the ground, not for things that come below the ground.” He’s not really pro-energy — he’s just pro-some-energy!

The Dem response has two tracks, one I think is politically smart and one I worry is shortsighted and ultimately self-defeating.

The smart response is to double-down on being the pro-energy candidate. That’s what Obama and his cabinet have been doing. They boast about increased oil and natural gas production while also insisting that clean energy innovation is a key part of an “all of the above” strategy — a part that the GOP is leaving out. Republicans aren’t pro-energy — they’re just pro-some-energy!

This is obviously not what any climate hawk would choose. “All of the above” is, as a matter of policy guidance, absurd. Nonetheless, it is aimed squarely at the bulk of public opinion; that’s the battle that must be fought and won.

The other track of the Dem response is less wise. It amounts to, “They did it too!” History is littered with Republicans enthusiastically grubbing for federal support for clean energy (and dirty energy) projects and companies in their home districts. Their sudden indignation at loan guarantees and the like smells of hypocrisy. I’ve indulged in this kind of thing myself on occasion.

You see, Romney helped secure the company a $1.5 million loan when he was governor of Massachusetts, and — here’s the twist — it recently declared bankruptcy! Ha ha! Romney “picked winners” in a failed bid at crony capitalism! I’m rubber, you’re glue, bounces off me and sticks to you.

This is an entirely Beltway-focused line of attack, meant to serve journalists the hypocrisy stories they find irresistible. But at what cost? The intent of the attack, as I hear it, is to show that Republicans generally and Romney specifically were “for it before they were against it” — they’ve flip-flopped on alternative energy, from moderate to far right.

Is that what’s coming across, though? When Konarka is called “Romney’s Solyndra,” I suspect political elites do not hear “Romney’s civic-minded attempt to support clean energy.” They hear scandal and vulnerability. They hear that funding clean-energy companies is a dark secret to be embarrassed about; that government support for clean energy is always cronyism; that solar is not a viable business, even with subsidies.

Konarka has been around since 2001. It was a spin-off from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, using organic chemistry and nanotechnology to make thin, flexible solar panels and spray-on solar dyes. In addition to $170 million worth of private funding, it received $20 million in help from the government, including from the Pentagon, the Bush White House, and, in a splashy 2003 press conference, then-Gov. Romney.

Konarka, like Solyndra, was based on a fateful bet against silicon solar panels. The hope was to innovate more efficient non-silicon alternatives and drive down the price enough to compete with silicon. Lots of companies were involved in that bet, as was quite a bit of bipartisan government support. Then along came China with its huge subsidies, manufacturing silicon panels in massive quantities, driving down the per-unit price, flooding the world with cheap product, and undercutting alternatives.

Eventually, silicon prices will rise and alternatives will become more competitive. When that day comes, we will look back on the demise of our domestic solar innovators with great regret. The fight to support them is no embarrassing secret, whether Romney or Obama did it. It was and is in our country’s best public-health, economic, and security interests. It’s a point of pride. It would be unfortunate if, in their enthusiasm to win a news cycle or two, Democrats and their spin doctors implied otherwise.

Filed under: Article, Cleantech, Election 2012, Energy Policy, Politics, Renewable Energy, Solar Power, Sustainable Business]]>http://grist.org/election-2012/lay-off-the-konarka-dem-energy-message-risks-defeating-dem-energy-message/feed/0Wrong Way Road SigndrgristWrong Way Road SignThe top five things voters need to know about conservatives and climate changehttp://grist.org/politics/the-top-five-things-voters-need-to-know-about-conservatives-and-climate-change/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_election2012
http://grist.org/politics/the-top-five-things-voters-need-to-know-about-conservatives-and-climate-change/#commentsMon, 04 Jun 2012 19:46:11 +0000http://grist.org/?p=109519]]>I’ve seen a recent surge of stories about conservatives and climate change. None of them, oddly, tell voters what they most need to know on the subject. In fact, one of them does the opposite. (Grrrr …)

I respond in accordance with internet tradition: a listicle!

5.Conservatives have a long history of advancing environmental progress. In a column directed to Mitt Romney, Thomas Friedman reels off (one suspects from memory) “the G.O.P.’s long tradition of environmental stewardship that some Republicans are still proud of: Teddy Roosevelt bequeathed us national parks, Richard Nixon the Clean Air Act and the Environmental Protection Agency, Ronald Reagan the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer and George H. W. Bush cap-and-trade that reduced acid rain.” This familiar litany is slightly misleading, attributing to presidents what is mostly the work of Congresses, but the basic point is valid enough: In the 20th century, Republicans have frequently played a constructive role on the environment.

4.There is a conservative approach to addressing climate change. Law professor Jonathan Adler has laid it out in the past and does so again in a much-discussed post over at The Atlantic. He suggests prizes for innovation, reduced regulatory barriers to alternative energy, a revenue-neutral carbon tax, and some measure of adaptation.

It’ll be no surprise to Adler or anyone else that I believe the problem is more severe than he does; solving it — as opposed to just “doing something” — will involve a far more vigorous government role than he envisions. But he makes an eloquent, principled case for the simple notion that “embrace of limited government principles need not entail the denial of environmental claims.” Conservatives could, if they wanted, spend their time arguing for their preferred solutions rather than denying scientific results.

3.There are conservatives who believe in taking action on climate change. Even those dismal polls we’re always talking about find 30 or 40 percent of Republicans acknowledging the threat of climate change. And support for clean air and clean energy policies remains high across the board. Heck, some — OK, a tiny handful of — conservatives are even brave enough to say so in public! It’s really only the hard nut of the GOP, anywhere from 15 to 30 percent, depending on how you measure, that is intensely and ideologically opposed to climate science and solutions alike. Oh, and almost all Republicans in Congress.

1.The Republican establishment has gone nuts on climate change and the environment.

This, more than anything, is what American voters need to know about the Republican Party — not what Republicans used to do, or what one or two outliers say, but what the party as an extant political force is devoted to today. The actually existing GOP wants to dismantle the EPA, open more public land to coal mining and oil drilling, remove what regulatory constraints remain on fossil-fuel companies, slash the budget for clean-energy research and deployment, scrap CAFE and efficiency standards, protect inefficient light bulbs, withdraw from all international negotiations or efforts on climate, and stop the military from using less oil.

I know journalists don’t headline their own pieces. But the piece itself isn’t much better. Take this bit:

Whether the data is inflated or not, the message that may be coming across most to voters is that there really isn’t much difference between Obama’s policies and those likely to be pursued in a Romney administration.

Ah, so the problem is not that Obama and Romney would have similar energy policies. That’s just the message “coming across to most voters.”

Now, if you’re a journalist, and you determine that voters are receiving a wildly incorrect message, what do you do? Do you write a story about their receipt of the incorrect message? Or do you correct the message?

The fact is, Romney would not pursue the same energy policies that Obama is pursuing. At all. Not even a little bit. It’s interesting, I suppose, that Romney used to run a state (and a state party) where moderate energy policy was demanded by voters. But what matters now is that Mitt Romney serves the present-day Republican Party, which has gone crazy.

The notion that Mitt Romney will rediscover some hidden internal moderate and buck the party on this stuff is just a VSP fantasy. Ever since he started running for president (this time around, anyway), he’s been frantically trying to please the right-wing base. Friedman says Romney’s “biggest challenge in attracting independent swing voters will be overcoming a well-earned reputation for saying whatever the Republican base wants to hear.” But self-styled centrists like Friedman have been saying this kind of thing forever and there remains very little indication that any Republican politician faces a tangible cost for pandering to the right.

All we have to do is replace Obama. … We are not auditioning for fearless leader. We don’t need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go. … We just need a president to sign this stuff. We don’t need someone to think it up or design it. The leadership now for the modern conservative movement for the next 20 years will be coming out of the House and the Senate.

…

Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States. This is a change for Republicans: the House and Senate doing the work with the president signing bills. His job is to be captain of the team, to sign the legislation that has already been prepared. [my emphasis]

Mitt Romney is well-aware — and if he wasn’t before, the primary taught him — that his job is to “sign the legislation that has already been prepared.” The leadership of the party is in Congress. It has declared skepticism of climate science the de facto party position. It has declared open war on clean energy, efficiency, and environmental protections. It has made clear that it will support fossil-fuel companies at every juncture.

That’s conservatives and climate for you. It’s interesting, intellectually, that there’s a history of green moderation in the party; that there’s a conceptual space where titular conservative principles overlap with climate protection; that many self-identified Republicans aren’t as crazy as their leaders; and that Romney used to pander in a different direction. But what’s relevant to voters who value climate and environmental protection is that they won’t get any under a GOP administration or a GOP Congress.

But then, in a Rolling Stone interview, Obama unexpectedly broke out of his self-imposed silence on climate change, saying he thought climate change would be a campaign issue.

Of course, it would be hard for climate to be a campaign issue if the president doesn’t actually talk about it in public. After all, his challenger Mitt Romney seems unlikely to bring it up, having Etch-a-Sketched his position on that subject many times. And Lord knows that media isn’t itching to talk about climate.

So it was disappointing again once again that on Thursday the president reverted to form in his big speech on energy at TPI Composites, a wind-blade manufacturing plant in Newton, Iowa.

The speech never mentions “climate change” or “global warming” or even “greenhouse gases” or “carbon” or even “pollution”!

It’s a fairly long speech, over half of which is focused on energy, to argue for extending “tax credits that are set to expire at the end of the year for clean-energy companies like TPI.” Those credits are certainly worth fighting for since 37,000 wind jobs are at stake — as is leadership in a global industry that will be one of the largest job creators in the coming decades when the world finally starts taking serious action on climate.

But as Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the ranking minority member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said last year:

If you are a science denier, there is no reason for government to invest in clean energy.

Now it may be that in the current political climate, no argument would win. But both climate action and federal clean energy investment are classicwedgeissues that have broad support with the American public, including independents and moderate Republicans, those not aligned with the Tea Party.

Here are the president’s remarks on energy in Iowa:

The fifth item on my “To-Do” list — I’m calling on Congress to extend tax credits that are set to expire at the end of the year for clean-energy companies like TPI. (Applause.) Let’s not wait. Let’s do it now. (Applause.)

Many of you know the story of what’s happening here better than I do, but I just want to remind you how far we’ve come. Shortly after I took office, I came to Newton — some of you remember — and we unveiled an all-of-the-above energy strategy for America. We said let’s produce more oil and gas, but let’s also produce more biofuels; let’s produce more fuel-efficient cars; let’s produce more solar and wind power and other sources of clean, renewable energy. And I came to Newton because Newton is helping to lead the way when it comes to building wind turbines.

And since then, our dependence on foreign oil has gone down every single year that I’ve been in office — every single year. (Applause.) America is now producing more domestic oil than any time in the last eight years. But we’re also producing more natural gas, and we’re producing more biofuels than any time in our history. And that’s good for the Iowa economy. (Applause.) We’re laying the foundation for some of our nation’s first offshore wind farms. And since I became President, America has nearly doubled the use of renewable energy, like solar power and wind power — we’ve nearly doubled it. (Applause.)

So this country is on the path towards more energy independence. And that’s good for everybody. It’s good for people’s pocketbooks; it’s good for the environment; it’s good for our national security. We don’t want our economy dependent on something that happens on the other side of the world. We don’t want every time there’s a scare about war or some regime change in the Middle East that suddenly everybody here is getting socked and the whole economy is going down.

And the best thing is, in the process, we’re also putting thousands of Americans back to work — because the more we rely on American-made energy, the less oil we buy from other countries, the more jobs we create here at home, the more jobs we create here in Iowa.

So let’s look at the wind industry. It’s so important to Iowa. This industry, thanks in large part to some very important tax credits, has now taken off. The state of Iowa now gets nearly 20 percent of all your electricity from wind — 20 percent. Overall, America now has enough wind capacity to power 10 million homes. So this is an industry on the rise. And as you know, it’s an industry that’s putting people to work. You know this firsthand. There are more wind power jobs in Iowa than any other state. That’s a big deal. (Applause.)

And one of these modern windmills has more than 8,000 different parts — everything from the towers and the blades to the gears, to the electrical switches. And it used to be that almost all these parts were imported. Today, more and more of these parts are being made here in America — right here. (Applause.) We used to have just a few dozen manufacturing facilities attached to the wind industry. Today we have nearly 500 facilities in 43 states employing tens of thousands of American workers — tens of thousands.

So we’re making progress. And you know it better than anybody. I mean, when I was talking to Quinten and Mark and a whole bunch of the other folks who are working here, they reminded me of the experience of working at Maytag and putting your heart and soul into a company and making a great product, and then, suddenly having that company leave, and how hard that was for families and how hard it was for the community. But folks made the transition.

And now, when you look at what’s happening here — 700 to 800 jobs, over $30 million being put back into the community — this gives folks hope. It gives people opportunity. I met some folks who have been in manufacturing for 30 years, but I also met a couple of young folks who were just getting started. And that’s what we’re looking for. Nobody wants a handout. Nobody wants to get something for nothing. But if we’ve got a chance to create energy and create value and put people back to work, why wouldn’t we do that?

So I’m here today because, as much progress as we’ve made, that progress is in jeopardy. If Congress doesn’t act, those tax credits that I mentioned — the ones that helped build up the wind industry, the ones that helped to bring all these jobs to Newton — those tax credits will expire at the end of the year if Congress doesn’t do anything.

If Congress doesn’t act, companies like this one will take a hit. Jobs will be lost. That’s not a guess, that’s a fact. We can’t let that happen. And keep in mind that — and this is something Congress needs to understand — Dave Loebsack understands it, but I want every member of Congress to understand it. These companies that are putting in orders for these amazing blades, they’re making plans now. They’re making decisions now. So if they’re cutting back on their orders, if they’re not confident that the industry is going to be moving at a fast clip and they start reducing orders here, that affects you. You can’t wait for six months. You can’t wait for eight months. You can’t wait for a year to get this done. It’s got to be done now. (Applause.)

So this is a simple thing on Congress’s “To-Do” list — extend these tax credits. Do it now. Every day they don’t act business grows more concerned that they will not be renewed. They’re worried demand for their products is going down, so they start thinking twice about expanding, more cautious about making new investments. They start looking overseas. I was talking to your CEO. We got an opportunity to branch out, but we want to branch out by making the stuff here and then sending it there. We don’t want to branch out by sending the jobs and the investments over there, and then shipping it back to America. That doesn’t make sense. (Applause.) One company that had plans to invest $100 million to build a wind manufacturing plant in Arkansas — and create hundreds of jobs — put those plans on hold.

And by the way, this should not be a partisan issue. There are several Republican governors — including the governor of this state — who are calling on Congress to act. There are members of Congress in both chambers and on both sides of the aisle — including your two senators — who support these tax credits. And that doesn’t happen much in Washington where Democrats and Republicans say they agree on something. So if you agree, why haven’t we gotten it done yet?

This is not just an issue, by the way, for the wind industry. Some of America’s most prominent companies — from Starbucks to Campbell’s Soup — they’re calling on Congress to act because they use renewable energy.

Well, actually many of those companies are calling on Congress to act because they are concerned about global warming, for which renewable energy is a core solution — see “Starbucks: Global Warming Is Hurting Coffee.”

How lame is it that a high-end coffeehouse chain is more comfortable talking about the gravest threat to the nation’s health and well-being than the president of the United States?

On Thursday, President Obama will visit TPI Composites, a wind manufacturer in Newton, Iowa (population, 15,254). There, he will reiterate his support for the Production Tax Credit (PTC), a federal support program that has helped drive wind’s rapid expansion in the U.S. The PTC is now in peril, as Congress appears unlikely to renew it when it expires at the end of this year. The loss of the PTC would put tens of thousands of current jobs — and almost 100,000 future jobs [PDF] — at risk.

Newton’s experience is illustrative, so let’s recount a little history.

Vulture capitalism

Newton used to be the “washing machine capital of the world,” with five washing machine manufacturers. One by one they closed, until there was only Maytag, which at its height employed around 4,000 Newtonians. Then, in 2006, Maytag was the subject of a bidding war. On one side was Chinese manufacturer Haier Group, in partnership with none other than former Romney employer Bain Capital (Romney was gone by then). On the other was Whirlpool.

Whirlpool won, but it would have been vulture capitalism either way. The Maytag plant was summarily shuttered and the jobs sent out of state.

Unsurprisingly, these developments have left wind power with broad bipartisan support in Iowa. Republican Gov. Terry Branstad has defended the wind industry and the PTC against attacks from the right. Even Iowa Rep. Steve King (R), one of the most notoriously bigoted right-wing nutbags in all of Congress, has said, “Now is the time for stability in the wind industry, and the PTC offers just that.” When they were in the state, Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, and Thaddeus McCotter (remember him?) all posed next to a wind-turbine blade made by none other than TPI Composites, to show their support for the industry.

(Side bar: A new analysis [PDF] shows that “adding more wind power to the electric grid could reduce wholesale market prices by more than 25 percent in the Midwest region by 2020.”)

But Romney hates wind

Despite support from Iowa Republicans for wind (and despite that turbine photo-op), Mitt Romney has expressed only contempt for the industry. He would end federal support for solar and wind alike, technologies that, he has said, “make little sense for the consuming public but great sense only for the companies reaping profits from taxpayer subsidies.” (Y’know, like Iowa’s own TPI Composites, the 700 people it employs, and the town it saved.)

And here he is in Colorado, smirking about the wind industry losing 10,000 jobs since 2009. That’s true, of course — it’s gone from a high of 85,000 to around 75,000 now — but mainly because the industry is nervous about the future of the PTC. Which Romney wants to kill for good. Thus insuring far greater job losses.

The fact is, if Republicans win Congress and Romney becomes president, all federal support for clean energy will dry up and Newton, along with other Midwestern towns that have been revitalized by wind, will suffer yet another devastating blow. I wonder if Iowa voters — sitting in one of 2012’s most important swing states — were thinking about that when Romney came to the state recently to lecture about the deficit.

OK, alright, Romney hasn’t actually picked his VP candidate yet, but we can already say with near-100 percent certainly that it’ll be someone who’s skeptical about the climate crisis and doubts that it’s significantly driven by human activity.

This is because virtually all high-level Republicans are skeptical about the climate crisis, at least judging by their public statements and actions. To find a Republican who believes that we ought to do even a little something about global warming, Romney would have to wade into the garbage bin of GOP politics and consort with losers and has-beens like Charlie Crist and Jon Huntsman. Fat chance.

Here are some of the incredibly boring white guys Romney might actually pick (along with a few outlier options who are non-white, non-boring, and/or non-guys), and some of the illuminating things they’ve said about climate change:

“I’m a skeptic. I’m not a scientist. I think the science has been politicized. I would be very wary of hollowing out our industrial base even further … It may be only partially man-made. It may not be warming by the way. The last six years we’ve actually had mean temperatures that are cooler.”

“The [climate] debate, so far, has been dominated by ‘experts’ from the University of Hollywood and the P.C. Institute of Technology. … Any dissident voice is likely to be the target of a fatwa issued by one Alatollah [sic] or another of the climate change theocracy, branding the dissenter as a ‘denier’ for refusing to bow down to the ‘scientific consensus.'”

“President Obama claims to be focusing this election year on the American economy. To make that pledge true, he must make wholesale changes to his energy policy and put energy prices and energy independence ahead of zealous adherence to left-wing environmental theory.”
(He didn’t say the word “climate,” but we can read between the lines.)

“Humans might be part of the cause, but too often in the debate it’s missed that the Earth has been warmer in the past and it has been a lot cooler in the past. … So I would say the science is mixed on a lot of those things.”

“So there is climate change, but the reality is the science of it indicates that most of it, if not all of it, is caused by natural causes. And as to the potential human contribution to that, there’s a great scientific dispute about that very issue.”

“Unilateral economic restraint in the name of fighting global warming has been a tough sell in our communities, where much of the state is buried under snow … [E]mail exchanges from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit … undermine confidence in the scientific data driving the climate change debates.”

“I’ve always said that climate change is real … we know enough to know that we are at least a part of the problem.”

Hey, wait, that’s not total denial! But Christie said it in a speech announcing that he was pulling New Jersey out of the first mandatory carbon cap-and-trade system in the country, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, so take it with your daily recommended allowance of salt.

Filed under: Article, Climate Change, Climate Skeptics, Election 2012, Politics]]>http://grist.org/election-2012/romney-choosing-climate-skeptic-as-running-mate/feed/0romney-flickr-gage_skidmorelisahymasromney-flickr-gage_skidmoreveep-bushveep-danielsveep-jindalveep-martinezveep-mcdonnellveep-pawlentyveep-portmanveep-rubioveep-ryanveep-christieBuzzword decoder: Your election-year guide to environmental catchphraseshttp://grist.org/election-2012/buzzword-decoder-your-election-year-guide-to-environmental-catchphrases/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_election2012
http://grist.org/election-2012/buzzword-decoder-your-election-year-guide-to-environmental-catchphrases/#commentsTue, 15 May 2012 11:08:22 +0000http://grist.org/?p=97959]]>Don’t expect the environment to be in the spotlight in political campaigns this year. The economy will be the star in 2012, with the culture wars singing backup.

Still, environmental issues are getting talked about, often obliquely as part of larger discussions about energy — though the words don’t always mean what you might think they mean. And the words politicians don’t say can tell you as much as the words they do.

Here’s a guide to energy and environmental buzzwords you’ll be hearing, or not, this election year:

Gas prices
Republicans thought they’d get a lot of mileage out of this phrase, but now it looks like it might not get them too far. When gas prices were trending upward earlier this year, Republicans went all out blaming Obama and the Democrats. Now that gas prices have come back down, the Republican messaging has gotten muddled. Still, the GOP is not quite ready to drop the issue.

Big Oil
Speaking of, “Big Oil” is a phrase you’ll only hear from Democrats this year. Obama’sparticularlyfond of it. Republicans don’t have a great rejoinder, as Big Solar and Big Wind don’t yet exist.

Keystone
If you hear a politician say the word “Keystone” this year, you can bet s/he’s a Republican.

Republicans, on the other hand, are doing everything in their power to keep the issue in the news — and they’re getting help from pipeline builder TransCanada, which recently reapplied for a permit. The GOP argues that Obama’s unwillingness to rubber-stamp the pipeline is hampering the economy and making America less energy secure — even though those argumentsarefalse. Currently the GOP is trying to force Keystone approval into a big transportation bill.

Many Democrats, meanwhile, are walking on eggshells around this one. They don’t want to anger the green wing of the base, which showed its might by elevating Keystone into a national issue last year. But they also don’t want to be painted as anti-job or tick off any of the unions that want to help build the pipeline (the labor community is split on the issue). A poll released by Hart Research in February suggested that the Keystone fight is winnable for Dems if they articulate a clear message — say, that the pipeline would create as few as 50 permanent jobs, according [PDF] to researchers at Cornell University, and that much of the oil it transports would be shipped overseas. But savvy, strategic messaging is not a Democratic strong suit of late.

Solyndra
If you hear a politician say the word “Solyndra” this year, you can know s/he’s a Republican.

Republicans will keep harping on the bankruptcy of solar company Solyndra, which got a federal loan guarantee of more than half a billion dollars. They say it shows the folly of the federal government trying to pick winners in the energy sector and boost the economy through stimulus spending, and recentads from GOP groups go further with salacious (and bogus) Solyndra-related charges. Romney slipped up earlier this year and said “Solyndra” when he meant “Keystone,” betraying the fact that Republicans see both issues primarily as cudgels with which to bash Obama.

Obama has been defending his administration’s Solyndra investment, albeit without mentioning the company’s name. His first TV ad of the campaign season went after his Solyndra critics. In March, he said, “Each successive generation recognizes that some technologies are going to work; some won’t. Some companies will fail; some companies will succeed,” echoing language from his State of the Union address in January. Other Dems have been less sure-footed in their responses to the Solyndra mess. Expect them to avoid the topic like the plague.

Clean energy
“Green jobs” is soooo 2008. “Clean energy” is now the phrase du jour if you want to talk about shifting to an economy based on renewables and efficiency — and so far, only Democrats do.

Obama is running hard on this theme: “I will not walk away from the promise of clean energy,” he’s saidmore than once. The president regularly visits cleantech companies and highlights the economic promise of cleantech jobs.

Republicans counter by talking about “energy jobs” — the kind that come from building pipelines and mining coal and fracking. “Drill baby drill” talk continues to resonate with the GOP base, while right-wing groups are trying to spark an anti-wind movement. Still, a handful of Republicans from states with big wind potential are calling for extension of a wind-energy tax credit that’s set to expire at the end of the year, recognizing that clean energy can be a job creator.

Pollafterpoll finds widespread support from voters across the spectrum for renewable power, so you’d think smart politicians would try to tap that vein.

Climate
In 2008, from the presidential candidates on down the ticket, Democrats and Republicans alike offered up plans for combating climate change. But you won’t be hearing “climate change” or “global warming” in many of this year’s stump speeches — and that absence speaks volumes.

President Obama recently told Rolling Stone that he thinks climate will become a campaign issue, but even he doesn’t seem to believe it. He didn’t even bother to mention climate change in his most recent Earth Day address. The president thinks he’ll reach more independents by talking about clean energy, energy innovation, and an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy (snatched right from the Republican playbook). Many of his fellow Democrats are following his lead and shunting climate into the shadows, still smarting from the ignominious death of climate legislation in 2010.

Mitt Romney doesn’t like to talk about climate change either because he’s flip-flopped on the issue. Most other Republican politicians bring up climate change only if they want to voice their skepticism. Former GOP Rep. Bob Inglis (S.C.) is launching a new group to promote conservative solutions to climate change, but don’t expect that effort to gain much traction this year.

We’ve been saying for a while that expensive gas is good news — not just because the expense of filling a tank could drive people into the arms of bikes and subways, but because affordable gas is a sign of a weak economy. But Fox News has continued to cling to the conviction that lower gas prices are best — probably because Obama was president and gas prices were on the rise.

Well, now gas prices are dipping a bit, but Obama is still president, so it’s time for their views to “evolve.” Media Matters caught various Foxers claiming that lower gas prices are now a sign of Obama ruining the economy.

Of course, Fox is only giving Obama credit for lower gas costs as a harbinger of a ruined economy. When it comes to the fact that gas, you know, costs less, he should by no means get credit, according to Fox host Stuart Varney:

[H]e has had nothing to do with bringing the gas price down the last few days. He’s had everything to do with pushing the gas price up over the last three years.

So, to sum up: High gas prices are a sign of economic recovery, and Obama is to blame for the gas prices, but should not get credit for the recovery, which does not exist, because Obama is president. Low gas prices are a sign of a flagging economy, which is Obama’s fault, but the low gas prices have nothing to do with him. Sounds legit.

In April, 16,991 negative ads aired in various parts of the country and 13,748 of them — or 81 percent — focused on energy, according to data provided by New York-based Kantar Media’s CMAG, which tracks advertising.

Energy? Really?

The details of the story make clear that the vast bulk of these negative energy ads are attack ads directed at Obama, purchased by big PACs — Americans for Prosperity, American Energy Alliance, Let Freedom Ring, Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies — awash in Big Oil money.

What the hell is going on? Why is energy dominating the right’s campaign against Obama?

Is this a response to public opinion? Doesn’t seem like it:

According to an April 13-17 CBS News/New York Times poll, 48 percent of Americans say the economy and jobs are the most important problem facing the country today. Fuel costs, which were chosen by 3 percent, fell behind health care and the budget deficit and national debt.

Most polls show something similar — the economy towers over every other issue.

Is it just that Big Oil has more money than … well, anyone else? It’s not like they’re the only wealthy industry that hates Obama — see, for instance, the financial sector. But then, Big Oil contains some of the most profitable corporations in the history of corporations, so maybe there are just lots of oil kajillionaires floating around with nothing better to do.

Is it just that Republicans have no other decent line of attack? The obvious way to go is the economy, but unfortunately for the GOP, the economy seems to be recovering, albeit slowly and fitfully, which is why Romney is being forced into such contortions. It’s not as though the U.S. public is demanding more crackdowns on contraception. Reactionary anti-immigrant and anti-gay policies work for the base, but not so much for the masses. Similarly, beating the war drums against Iran fires up neocons and chest-beaters, but the public at large isn’t eager for more conflict. And to the great confusion and frustration of the Tea Party, Americans generally like Obama on a personal level.

So what does the GOP have to offer? There’s just not much in the cupboard. Energy is one of the only remaining issues where the right thinks it has a clear advantage, an ability to tie Obama to the far left and turn Independents against him. (I think they’re wrong about this, and given Obama’s concerted pushback — a sharp break from the typical Democratic “Frantic Retreat” strategy on energy — it sounds like his campaign does too.) It may be that attacks are focused on energy because they simply can’t think of anything else.

I don’t feel like I have a great explanation for this. What accounts for the overwhelming dominance of Big Oil and energy in the right’s campaign against Obama? What do y’all think?

In a Rolling Stoneinterview published Wednesday, President Obama broke out of his self-imposed silence on climate change. He made some remarkable statements, including his belief that the millions of dollars pouring into the anti-science disinformation campaign will drive climate change into the presidential campaign.

Earlier this year, the president omitted any discussion of climate change from his State of the Union address. And he (or the White House communications team) edited it out of his Earth Day proclamation.

But in this interview, Obama was actually the first to bring up climate change, noting it was one of many big issues he’s had to deal with and then slamming the GOP for moving so far to the right on the issue.

The big news was that the president expects climate change to be a campaign issue:

Part of the challenge over these past three years has been that people’s number-one priority is finding a job and paying the mortgage and dealing with high gas prices. In that environment, it’s been easy for the other side to pour millions of dollars into a campaign to debunk climate-change science. I suspect that over the next six months, this is going to be a debate that will become part of the campaign, and I will be very clear in voicing my belief that we’re going to have to take further steps to deal with climate change in a serious way. That there’s a way to do it that is entirely compatible with strong economic growth and job creation – that taking steps, for example, to retrofit buildings all across America with existing technologies will reduce our power usage by 15 or 20 percent. That’s an achievable goal, and we should be getting started now. [Emphasis mine.]

My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet. And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us.

But I doubt Romney will want to talk about climate change since that statement is a major flip-flop aimed at the Tea Party extremists who now help decide GOP primaries. Also, Romney’s team presumably knows what team Obama doesn’t: Every poll makes clear that in the general election, climate change, clean energy, and cutting pollution are some of the defining wedge issues of our time.

The media also seems unlikely to bring up the issue given that they have generally ignored it as a topic for debate questions, and regular news coverage of it has collapsed.

That means if it is going to be a campaign issue, the president and his team would have to introduce it and be willing to press the case, something they have shown no inclination to do so far.

The president made two other very interesting statements on climate. First, in response to a question on the Keystone XL tar-sands pipeline, he basically said that the reason the issue flared up is because of his inability to achieve “sufficient movement to deal with the problem”:

James Hansen, NASA’s leading climate scientist, has said this about the Keystone pipeline: that if the pipeline goes through and we burn tar sands in Canada, it’s “game over” for the planet. What’s your reaction to that statement?

James Hansen is a scientist who has done an enormous amount not only to understand climate change, but also to help publicize the issue. I have the utmost respect for scientists. But it’s important to understand that Canada is going to be moving forward with tar sands, regardless of what we do. That’s their national policy, they’re pursuing it. With respect to Keystone, my goal has been to have an honest process, and I have adamantly objected to Congress trying to circumvent a process that was well-established not just under Democratic administrations, but also under Republican administrations.

The reason that Keystone got so much attention is not because that particular pipeline is a make-or-break issue for climate change, but because those who have looked at the science of climate change are scared and concerned about a general lack of sufficient movement to deal with the problem. Frankly, I’m deeply concerned that internationally, we have not made as much progress as we need to make. Within the constraints of this Congress, we’ve tried to do a whole range of things, administratively, that are making a difference — doubling fuel-efficiency standards on cars is going to take a whole lot of carbon out of our atmosphere. We’re going to continue to push on energy efficiency, and renewable energy standards, and the promotion of green energy. But there is no doubt that we have a lot more work to do.

Obama’s statement above about climate becoming a campaign issue is the last part of his answer here.

I’d say that Obama is half right in his answer. It is certainly true that if, say, Obama had been able to pass a climate bill, then the Keystone pipeline would never have emerged as such a make-or-break issue. But for those of us trying to keep warming below 4 degrees F, it always would have been a big issue.

Obama is also being a bit coy here by suggesting that lack of international progress was a key reason Keystone got so much attention. A major reason there has been little international progress is that the world’s richest country — which has by far the largest cumulative emissions — can’t even guarantee it will meet Obama’s modest 17 percent reduction pledge by 2020. American action is certainly a sine qua non for a global deal.

Yes, Obama has done some valuable things, and he certainly has been thwarted at every turn by the disinformers and their allies in Congress. They, not Obama, deserve most of the blame for inaction, as I’ve said many times. But Obama still failed to push this most important of issues anywhere near as hard as it merits.

And it’s odd for him to complain about the disinformation campaign when Obama has done nothing to debunk it. Indeed, I’ve been told by folks in the White House that it was the White House communications team that muzzled a response to that disinformation.

Finally, Obama has some interesting framing on the opponents of action:

I think it’s important to distinguish between Republican politicians and people around the country who consider themselves Republicans. I don’t think there’s been a huge change in the country. If you talk to a lot of Republicans … they don’t think we should be getting rid of every regulation on the books …

But what’s happened, I think, in the Republican caucus in Congress, and what clearly happened with respect to Republican candidates, was a shift to an agenda that is far out of the mainstream — and, in fact, is contrary to a lot of Republican precepts…. You’ve got a Republican Congress whose centerpiece, when it comes to economic development, is getting rid of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Doesn’t all of that kind of talk and behavior during the primaries define the party and what they stand for?

I think it’s fair to say that this has become the way that the Republican political class and activists define themselves. Think about John McCain, who obviously I have profound differences with. Here’s a guy who not only believed in climate change, but co-sponsored a cap-and-trade bill that got 43 votes in the Senate just a few years ago, somebody who thought banning torture was the right thing to do, somebody who co-sponsored immigration reform with Ted Kennedy. That’s the most recent Republican candidate, and that gives you some sense of how profoundly that party has shifted.

So Obama is drawing a distinction between “the Republican political class and activists” on the one hand and “people around the country who consider themselves Republicans.” I think that is a reasonable distinction to draw, but then it will be important for the president to carry this distinction to its logical conclusion on the key issues. He is basically acknowledging that climate action and clean energy and cutting pollution are wedge issues — issues that separate GOP politicians and activists (and their pollutocrat backers) from a segment of their own supporter and an even larger proportion of independents.

Again, that’s what all the polling shows, but it is most certainly not how the president and his team have been treating the issue, which they have repeatedly downplayed. Let’s hope that this interview signals a change in thinking by the president — a change that he can actually get the rest of the White House, including the communications team, to go along with. That would be change we can believe in.

Everyone knows that “Obamacare” was modeled on Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts health-care law. But did you know that a key Obama “smart growth” initiative — the Partnership for Sustainable Communities — was also created in the mold of a Romney program?

Tea Partiers rallied to quash funding for this Obama partnership last fall. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), conservative darling, criticized the idea for the partnership when it first arose and accused the Obama administration of trying to impose “an urban-utopian fantasy through an unprecedented intrusion of the Federal Government into the shaping of local communities.” The Republican National Committee recently warned that smart growth is part of a U.N. conspiracy (green helicopters, anyone?).

This is yet another issue on which the party’s presumptive presidential nominee looks to be seriously out of sync with the GOP base.

Romney’s “get smart” phase

As governor of Massachusetts, Romney actively fought sprawl and promoted density. He ran on a smart-growth platform: “Sprawl is the most important quality-of-life issue facing Massachusetts,” he said in 2002.

After winning, Romney swiftly set about remaking state government to encourage smarter land use. He created a powerful new Office for Commonwealth Development, and appointed an aggressive environmental activist to run it — Douglas Foy, who for 25 years had headed the Conservation Law Foundation, a litigious regional environmental group. The state’s business community was appalled.

The Office for Commonwealth Development served as a “super-secretariat” or umbrella office for state agencies dealing with transportation, housing, energy, and the environment. It made sure the agencies were all pulling in the same direction toward smart-growth goals — concentrating development in town centers, constructing housing near transit stations, fixing existing roads instead of building new ones.

“I think [Romney] views sprawl as inefficient land use, and he’s all about efficiency. From a business perspective, he thinks smart growth makes a lot of sense,” says Anthony Flint, who served as a policy advisor in the Office for Commonwealth Development under Romney, and is now a fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a think tank in Cambridge, Mass.

The Romney administration pursued smart growth not through strict regulation but through incentives. The Office for Commonwealth Development channeled hundreds of millions in state funds to cities and towns that changed zoning rules to allow more high-density housing and adopted other smart-growth policies.

Romney was a vocal advocate for the cause. “I very much believe in the concept known as smart growth or sustainable development, which is the phrase I used in the campaign,” Romney told CommonWealth magazine in 2003. “You do not want to deplete your green space and air and water [in order] to grow, and the only way that’s possible is if your growth is done in a thoughtful, coherent, strategic way.”

Environmental activists still foundplentytocriticize in Romney’s approach to land use and development, but many greens and smart-growth advocates were pleasantly surprised, at least in the first half of Romney’s term. In 2006, the U.S. EPA gave Massachusetts’ Office for Commonwealth Development its National Award for Smart Growth Achievement.

Obama follows Romney’s lead

Under President Obama, the EPA moved from praising Romney’s smart-growth office to mimicking it.

In June 2009, the Obama team created the Partnership for Sustainable Communities in the silo-busting mold of Romney’s Office for Commonwealth Development. The partnership brings together the EPA, the Department of Transportation, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development to jointly promote smart growth.

“We want to make sure that when we’re building infrastructure, we’re considering how housing, transportation, and the environment all impact each other,” Obama explained in 2010, sounding an awful lot like the Romney of yore.

Just as Romney’s Office for Commonwealth Development incentivized local communities to embrace smart growth by offering grants, so does the Partnership for Sustainable Communities. Since its launch, the partnership has helped to allocate about $3.5 billion in grants and other assistance to more than 700 communities that want to better coordinate housing, transportation, and economic-development projects and make neighborhoods more walkable, transit-accessible, and sustainable.

Tea Partiers go nuts

You might think this all sounds benign or common sense, or even classically conservative — conserving land, conserving gas, and conserving taxpayer dollars by preventing the construction of new roads and sewer systems for sprawling new communities. But that’s not how today’s Republican Party sees it.

Tea Partiers are fighting smart-growth programs tooth and nail, believing them to be part of an insidious U.N. plot. Their fears center around a once-obscure, non-binding U.N. sustainability plan called Agenda 21, which came out of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit and called for, among other things, “fulfillment of basic needs, improved living standards for all, better protected and managed ecosystems” and — gasp! — “sustainable land-use planning and management.” Like most non-binding U.N. documents — in fact, like most binding U.N. documents — Agenda 21 was widely ignored. That is, until American right-wingers latched onto it a few years ago.

Last fall, Tea Partiers erroneously linked Obama’s Partnership for Sustainable Communities to Agenda 21, and groups around the country mobilized to fight its funding in Congress. “This funding has been using YOUR tax dollars to promote the United Nations’ plan to control our government,” warned the Gainsville Tea Party. It’s an “assault on property rights and America’s way of life,” railed the Sandia Tea Party of New Mexico. “STOP THE GRAVY TRAIN!!!” demanded the Southwest Virginia Tea Party. Congress did cutsome funding for the partnership’s grant making, but the partnership lives on and continues to help allocate funds to local communities.

Meanwhile, as the Agenda 21 conspiracy theorizing has grown louder over the past year, big-name Republicans have joined in. Newt Gingrich inveighed against Agenda 21 on the campaign trail last year, and even mentioned it during a debate in November. That same month, Rick Santorum warned about Agenda 21 in a Facebook post.

In January, the Republican National Committee adopted a resolution “exposing” Agenda 21 as a “comprehensive plan of extreme environmentalism, social engineering, and global political control.” In an apparent slam against the Sustainable Communities grant program, the resolution called for “rejection of any grant monies” linked to Agenda 21. The resolution could make it into the official Republican Party platform that will be decided upon at the national convention in August.

Where’s Mitt now?

As you might expect, Romney has not been talking about sprawl or smart growth on the campaign trail, and his campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

With other issues — like health care, abortion, and immigration — Romney has flip-flopped from the centrist views he held as governor to right-wing positions now preferred by the GOP base. Because smart growth hasn’t risen to the level of national discussion, Romney hasn’t had to clarify his position on this topic.

Romney told a small group of donors last week that he might completely eliminate one of the departments involved in the Partnership for Sustainable Communities — HUD, which his father headed during the Nixon administration. A few months ago, Romney said the EPA under Obama was “out of control,” though he’s stopped short of calling for it to be abolished. Considering those views, it seems highly unlikely that Romney would want anything like the partnership operating under his watch.

Perhaps, in the same way he has defended his Massachusetts health-care program, Romney would argue that pursuing smart growth at the state level makes sense while doing so at the federal level would be overreach. But as both Romney’s Office for Commonwealth Development and Obama’s Partnership for Sustainable Communities used taxpayer dollars to influence what local communities do, is there really such a dramatic distinction between them?

People who worked with or closely observed Romney during his governorship aren’t sure what his current, or “real,” views on smart growth are.

Foy, the first head of Romney’s Office for Commonwealth Development, recently told The New Republic, “I’m proud of what we did, and I think he’s proud of what we did.” But Foy quit the administration after three years, shortly following Romney’s surprise move to pull Massachusetts out of a Northeast cap-and-trade program that Foy had helped to develop, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

Jack Clarke, director of public policy at Mass Audubon and a former environmental official under Massachusetts Gov. William Weld (R), credits Romney with appointing good people to work on smart growth, but says “it wasn’t a core value” for the governor. He doesn’t believe Romney would do anything to advance the cause as president.

Flint, who worked under Foy, says, “Romney the governor was very active on the environment and smart growth and, for a time, climate change.” And now? “His positions on those topics have certainly changed, so I’m not sure what to think.”

Mitt Romney’s campaign has benefited from Big Oil and Big Coal’s backing, which have poured more than $16 million into ads attacking President Barack Obama’s energy policies. As a favor, Romney says he plans to open public lands and water to drilling while undoing safety and environmental protections.

Below, we take a side-by-side look at Obama’s and Romney’s policies and their divisions on fossil fuels, clean energy, public health, and pollution. Beneath the chart is a more detailed comparison of the candidates’ energy proposals and rhetoric.

Oil and gas production

Obama:

Domestic oil production reached its highest level in eight years last year. Between oil and gas drilling rigs, the United States now has more rigs at work than the rest of the world combined. Imports fell to lowest level in 16 years, under 50 percent of oil consumption. [White House, 3/12/12]

Raised safety standards for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico following the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, strengthening well design, testing, control equipment, and workplace safety. The region was not hurt economically by a temporary moratorium, which has the same unemployment as two years ago and had rising personal income in 2011. [White House, 3/30/12 (PDF), NOLA, 4/15/12]

Crude oil production from federal lands and waters was higher in 2011 than any of the last three years of the Bush administration. [Energy Information Administration, 3/14/12 (PDF)]

Romney:

Opens up the Florida portion of the Gulf of Mexico to new drilling, the Atlantic and Pacific Outer Continental Shelves, public lands, and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Accelerates drilling permits. [MittRomney.com, 2011 (PDF)]

Called the temporary moratorium on drilling in the Gulf following the Deepwater Horizon disaster “illegal.” [CBS News, 3/9/12]

Big Oil subsidies

Obama:

Calls on Congress to end oil subsidies and to double down on clean energy investments. [White House, 3/28/12]

“He’s now decided that gasoline prices should come down. The gas hike trio has been going in the other direction. Time for them to go, probably hand in their resignations if he’s really serious about that.” [Boston Globe, 3/19/12]

Energy efficiency

Obama:

Finalizing new modern standards requiring cars and light-duty trucks to achieve an average fuel economy rating of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025 — double the rate in 2010. These savings will cut U.S. oil use by 2.2 million barrels per day by 2025—a move that will save drivers $8,000 per vehicle due to fewer gasoline purchases compared to a 2010 car. [White House, 3/12/12]

Directed federal agencies to make $2 billion worth of energy efficiency upgrades in two years. [NYT, 12/3/11]

Romney:

Against raising standards for energy-efficient lighting, which was coauthored by Republicans and signed into law by President George W. Bush. “The government would have banned Thomas Edison’s light bulb,” Romney said. “Oh yeah, Obama’s regulators actually did.” [Huffington Post, 3/19/12]

Supports the House GOP Ryan budget, which would cut investments in energy efficiency by 20 percent in 2013. [House.gov, 3/19/12 (PDF)]

Public lands

Obama:

Announced he would “allow the development of clean energy on enough public land to power 3 million homes.” [White House, 1/24/12]

Signed a sweeping public lands bill in 2009 that designated 2 million acres of wilderness and three national parks. [AP, 3/31/09]

Created a national monument of a Civil War-era Fort Monroe, Va., embracing the 1906 Antiquities Act. [National Trust For Historic Preservation, 11/1/11]

Romney:

Romney said “I haven’t studied […] what the purpose is of” public lands. But he finds it unacceptable when conservation is “designed to satisfy, let’s say, the most extreme environmentalists, from keeping a population from developing their coal, their gold, their other resources for the benefit of the state.” [McClatchy, 2/16/12]

Fully embraced the House Republican budget from Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), calling it “bold and brilliant.” It sells off 3.3 millions of acres of national parks and public lands. [ThinkProgress, 3/21/12]

Global warming

Obama:

“I know that there are those who disagree with the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change. But here’s the thing — even if you doubt the evidence, providing incentives for energy-efficiency and clean energy are the right thing to do for our future — because the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy.” [White House, 1/27/10]

State Department is leading a group of countries in a program that cuts global warming pollutants like soot, methane, and hydrofluorocarbons. [NYT, 2/16/12]

Issued the first ever carbon pollution rules for power plants, affecting new coal-fired power plants. [NPR, 3/27/12]

Romney:

Doesn’t believe carbon pollution is a threat, reversing his stance as governor: “I don’t think carbon is a pollutant in the sense of harming our bodies.” [Politico, 7/18/11]

“My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet. And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us.” [CBS, 10/28/11]

Says the Clean Air Act doesn’t apply to carbon emissions: “My view is that the EPA in getting into carbon and regulating carbon has gone beyond the original intent of that legislation, and I would not take it there.” [Politico, 7/18/11]

“Aggressively” develop all our coal sources. “Coal is America’s most abundant energy source. We have reserves that—at current rates of uses—will last for the next 200 years of electricity production in an industry that directly employs perhaps 200,000 workers.” [NYT, 4/3/12, MittRomney.com (PDF)]

Against new EPA regulations of harmful mercury and air pollutants from coal: “I think the EPA has gotten completely out of control for a very simple reason. It is a tool in the hands of the president to crush the private enterprise system, to crush our ability to have energy, whether it’s oil, gas, coal, nuclear.” [The Hill, 12/5/11]

Fuel-efficient cars

Obama:

New modern standards require cars and some trucks to achieve an average 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. This cuts U.S. oil consumption by 2.2 million barrels of oil per day by 2025, saving Americans $1.7 trillion and cuts carbon pollution. [White House, 11/17/11]

Set a goal that by 2015 there would be 1 million electric vehicles on the road. [White House, 3/12/12]

Romney:

Disparaged the Chevrolet Volt as “an idea whose time has not come” and “I’m not sure America was ready for the Chevy Volt.” [Michigan Live, 12/23/11, MSNBC 4/5/12]

Clean energy

Obama:

“I will not walk away from the promise of clean energy. I will not cede the wind or solar or battery industry to China or Germany because we refuse to make the same commitment here.” [State of the Union, 1/24/12]

Transforming the Pentagon into a clean energy operation, reducing the military’s dependence on fossil fuels that cost the Pentagon up to $20 billion annually. Investing in hybrid batteries. [National Journal, 4/11/12]

Romney:

“You can’t drive a car with a windmill on it.” [ThinkProgress, 3/6/12]

Endorses the Ryan House Republican budget, which gives a 60 percent funding increase to coal, oil, and natural gas, while it decreases funding for research on vehicle batteries and solar projects, and loans for fuel-efficient cars. [Politico, 4/17/12]

Against the government promoting clean energy, though supports tax loopholes for oil: “Let’s pretend for a moment that [Solyndra] didn’t go bankrupt. Let’s just pretend it was successful … When he picks one [business] that the government gets behind with $500 million, the investments in all the others disappear, because no one wants to compete with the government.” [The Hill, 12/20/11]

Green jobs

Obama:

Historic level of investment in clean energy, a sector now with 3.1 million Americans employed. In 2008, Obama promised to create 5 million green jobs. [AP, 3/22/12]

Romney:

Repeatedly called green jobs fake, for example calling them “illusory” in an op-ed. “[Obama] keeps talking about green jobs, where are they?” [OC Register, 10/24/11, League of Conservation Voters, 9/15/11]

Against renewable energy production credits, which risks the end of 37,000 jobs, according to a figure from Navigant Consulting. [Chicago Tribune, 2/17/12]

When the leaders of more than 100 countries meet this June to discuss the small matter of the Future of Life on Earth, President Obama might be there. Then again, maybe he’s got a golf match scheduled that day. He’s not saying.

Yes, it’s true, the guy who just picked up an early endorsement from Big Green groups like the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters, the man who announced in his last State of the Union Address that “America remains the one indispensable nation in world affairs,” may be a no-show at the 2012 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

When asked about the president’s plans on Tuesday, U.S. Special Envoy on Climate Change Todd Stern told The Washington Post, “I don’t have any understanding that the president has any intention of going.” A White House spokesperson was noncommittal: “I don’t have any scheduling announcements at this time.”

Despite the flaccid showing from the U.S., the first Rio summit produced several important policy landmarks, including a major commitment to protect biological diversity and a climate change framework that led to the Kyoto Protocol, a global climate treaty that Bush Jr. famously refused to sign.

Another product of the summit was Agenda 21, a non-binding document that is currently a favorite bogeyman for wing nuts and conspiracy theorists — including the Republican National Committee, which wants to include an anti-Agenda 21 statement in the GOP’s national party platform this fall.

This may explain why President Obama is wary of attending the Earth Summit. I mean, who would want to be associated with a document that promotes such nefarious goals as “fulfillment of basic needs, improved living standards for all, better protected and managed ecosystems, and a safer, more prosperous future.”

And in an election year! It’s political suicide!

To be fair, it doesn’t look like the 2012 Earth Summit will produce anything as bold as the original summit did. Months of political jockeying have produced a proposal that has been dubbed, in wildly ironic U.N. speak, the “zero draft.” The Obama administration has called on the world community to boil this nebulous tome down to a five-page list of action-items, and wants delegates to bring a “cloud of commitments” that they are willing to undertake country-by-country.

Of course, it would help their cause if the president could commit, himself, to showing up. “If President Obama is not in Rio, it will be noticed,” says Jacob Scherr, who tracks international policy for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It will signal that the United States is relinquishing its leadership role in regard to the environment, and more generally.”

Several groups have started online petitions urging Obama to attend the Earth Summit, including this one on Change.org and this one on Facebook. Seeing as he’s planning to attend the G20 economic summit in Mexico a few days prior, maybe we should just send him a plane ticket from there to Rio.

Oh, right! The president has his own plane! Let’s just send him a map — or better yet, a globe. If he’s going to run his planet, Obama had better get serious about saving it.

Watch for more coverage of the 2012 Earth Summit in Grist in the coming weeks. We’ll also report live from Rio in June.

But if you chip away at that brown paint, there’s a layer of green underneath. (As for what’s beneath that layer, and then the one below that, who knows?) When he was governor of Massachusetts, Romney was about as green as Republicans get (if you don’t count the now-disgraced Governator, and many Republicans don’t). Check out these eco-friendly stances from Romney’s past:

Coal: While Romney was in the governor’s mansion, Massachusetts cracked down on pollution from coal-fired power plants. In a feisty speech in front of one particularly filthy plant in 2003, Romney said he would not support coal-plant jobs “that kill people.”

Gas prices: In 2006, during a price spike, Romney swatted away calls to suspend a state gas tax, saying, “I don’t think that now is the time, and I’m not sure there will be the right time, for us to encourage the use of more gasoline.”

Now he says, “The best thing we can do to get the price of gas to be more moderate and not have to be dependent upon the cartel is: drill in the Gulf, drill in the outer continent shelf, drill in ANWR, drill in North Dakota, South Dakota, drill in Oklahoma and Texas” — never mind that his own economic team disagrees.

Cleantech investment: In 2003, Romney created a taxpayer-financed Green Energy Fund to help renewable-energy companies get off the ground.

Fuel economy: In 2007, Romney called for autos to get 50 miles per gallon, and lamented that CAFE standards hadn’t been applied to trucks.

Now he argues CAFE rules have been “disadvantageous for domestic manufacturers” and says, “We need to get the government out of these companies’ hair.”

Plug-in cars: In 2007, Romney called for more plug-in electric cars as a way of reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

Now he ridicules the Chevy Volt, an American-made plug-in hybrid electric, and pours scorn on clean energy and green cars alike by saying, “you can’t drive a car with a windmill on top.”

Climate change: As governor, Romney introduced the Massachusetts Climate Protection Plan, and helped promote and shape a carbon cap-and-trade program for Northeastern states, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (though he pulled his state out at the last minute — coincidentally, just as he started angling to run for president). In his 2010 book, he wrote, “I believe that climate change is occurring — the reduction in the size of global ice caps is hard to ignore. I also believe that human activity is a contributing factor.” In 2011, he said that we need to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, a comment that won him praise from Al Gore.

That nod from the Goracle might have been what goaded him into brownwashing his record, as he’s been steadily backing away from even modest climate concern ever since. A few months ago, he went so far as to say, “we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet.”

Careful with your neck there — you could get whiplash trying to keep track of all this.

So which of these views represent the real Romney? Some of his big-money backers think he’s got a green core and would fight climate change once in office. Don’t bet on it. A President Romney would be beholden to conservative donors, surrounded by conservative advisors, and solicitous of conservative voters — at least until he won a second term.

On Earth Day, April 22, Romney is scheduled to visit Greencastle, Penn., and make a speech at the Green Grove Gardens event center. The old Romney might have grooved on that green theme. The new Romney might want to move his speech to Brownsville, Penn., instead.

Gingrich, who actually has a weird tradition of getting sat on by wild animals, has talked about how much he wanted to be a zoologist growing up, before he decided to abandon all his principles in a desperate lunge at the presidency. But the penguin was having none of that bullshit. Presumably it just saw a man who sold out his Sierra Club principles, and decided to go all Occupy Finger. Or, you know, Gingrich’s fingers look like jumbo shrimps. Either is possible.

At press time, the penguin was not suffering from sepsis, but is hopefully under observation.

What would it take to make this the new glitterbombing? If every politician who denies global warming, supports drilling in ANWR, or is cavalier about the wildlife impact of oil production had to contend with tiny avenging penguin jaws, the campaign would be a lot more tolerable.

Filed under: Animals, Election 2012, Politics]]>http://grist.org/list/penguin-lives-the-dream-bites-newt-gingrich/feed/0penguins_bitejesszimmermanpenguins_biteBeing Green: Presidential hopeful Jill Stein aims to rebuild a broken systemhttp://grist.org/election-2012/being-green-presidential-hopeful-jill-stein-aims-to-rebuild-a-broken-system/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_election2012
http://grist.org/election-2012/being-green-presidential-hopeful-jill-stein-aims-to-rebuild-a-broken-system/#commentsFri, 06 Apr 2012 11:42:43 +0000http://grist.org/?p=91497]]>Lost amid the carnival of embarrassments that is the Republican presidential primary is the fact that there is another primary race underway: the Green Party’s. “What?” you say. “Those guys are still around?”Well yes, but they’re not guys.

The front-runner in the race is Jill Stein, a Boston physician and veteran activist and candidate with the Massachusetts Green-Rainbow Party. (Note to the good people of the Bay State: We get that you’re trying to be inclusive, but a name like that is NO WAY to win respect in the world.) She is currently trouncing the second-place runner, former sitcom star Roseanne Barr. (Note to the good people of the Green Party: Oh, never mind …)

Lest you think this is all rainbows and ponies, however, Stein is not messing around. She says she became involved in politics after witnessing firsthand the epidemics of obesity, diabetes, learning disorders, autism — problems that she traces to toxic chemicals, an industrial food system, and a society built around the automobile.

Stein’s presidential platform includes universal health care, tuition-free higher education, and forgiveness of student debt. And at the center of it all is a Green New Deal that she says will put millions of people to work, tackle the climate crisis, and address our failing health as well.

The Green Party will choose its candidate for president at a national convention in Baltimore in July. If things continue as they have been, Stein will win the spot handily. (She has won 10 of 10 state primaries, plus the District of Columbia.) I talked with her earlier this week.

A. Well, that part of it is a joke. He did not invite us. But the rest of it is actually true. I have debated him [during the 2002 race for Massachusetts governor], and I was declared winner by more than one objective source.

Q.Did someone really say you were the only adult in the room?

A. Yes, that was an editorial in the Boston Globe, and if you watch the debate you’ll see why.

Q.Doesn’t a sense of humor automatically disqualify you from the presidency?

A. A sense of humor and lack of corporate funding are substantial obstacles. But I think that we’re part of a very large movement to change the way that politics works — so that the joke is no longer on us.

Q.Running for president under the Green Party banner, your motivations have to be something besides actually landing in the White House. I assume your campaign is largely an effort to change the system.

A. That’s right, and a journey begins with the first step. That said, no one in their right mind ever expected that young people in the streets were going to give the boot to an entrenched dictator, either in Egypt or in Tunisia. So remarkable things have been happening, likewise with the Occupy movement. There is enormous public will out there for substantive change.

The solutions that we are promoting — we don’t need to convince people that we need a climate we can live in, that we need health care as a human right, that we need to be creating jobs rather than just giving more tax breaks and giveaways to CEOs who just pocket the change — these are solutions that people already support. The question is whether we can actually harness our political system and move them forward.

Q.As disappointing as Obama has been, there’s a lot at stake in this election. Why should voters give you a vote when we could end up with a situation like we saw with Ralph Nader and Al Gore in 2000?

A. Progressives have been told we dare not vote for our values and our vision because dangerous things will happen — witness Ralph Nader. We have 10 years of experience with muzzling ourselves politically, and it’s very clear now that silence has not been an effective political strategy, and that the politics of fear in fact has delivered all those things that we were afraid of.

Obama has basically embraced most of Bush’s policies, including drill baby drill, pro-nuke, pro-coal, undermining the Durban [climate] accords. He’s celebrating the beginnings of the Keystone pipeline. We still have twice as many troops in Afghanistan as we had under George Bush. The only reason Obama withdrew from Iraq was because he was unable to negotiate immunity for the troops, so he wound up having to accept what was George Bush’s timeline for withdrawal.

So the point here is that by being quiet, we have essentially allowed corporations to run government whole hog. Obama has been very responsive to his corporate sponsors. So it’s really critical that we have an opposition voice.

Q.In how many states are you even on the ballot?

A. We’re currently on in 20 states. We expect to be on the ballot in 46, maybe 48 states. We do have some very difficult states — two that are impossible barring millions and millions of dollars.

Q.Is there any hope of getting you into a real debate?

A. Absolutely. The Commission on Presidential Debates has a standard, which is 15 percent [of the national electorate, as determined by public opinion polls]. If everybody who cared about the climate got on board and actually stood up and said that they’re supporting this campaign, that alone might be enough to get us into the debates. If all the students out there who are up to their eyeballs in debt stood up for this campaign, we would easily be at 15 percent.

If I can quote Alice Walker, “The biggest way people give up power is by not knowing they have it to start with.” And that’s true, for the environmental movement, the student movement, the antiwar movement, health-care-as-a-human-right movement — you put us all together, we have the potential for a Tahrir Square type event, and [to] turn the White House into a Green House in November.

Q.Is the Green Party itself something of a kiss of death in this country right now?

A. We ran a referendum here in Massachusetts — I’m talking about the Green Party along with some nonprofits. The referendum was non-binding. We basically proposed redefining economic development to be green, sustainable, re-localized, and healthy, and to create local small businesses and cooperatives in the green sectors of the economy, rather than just dishing out billions to multinational corporations that are part of the old fossil fuel economy.

We didn’t have money to spend on the referendum. We were hoping maybe we could get 10 or 15 percent [of the vote]. We actually got between 85 and 95 percent in every community — not just the treehuggers, but also the postindustrial, desperately poor urban communities as well. To me, it confirmed what I find in my everyday experience: People are into this. They get it.

Q.You’re using the same model for the Green New Deal you’re pushing on the national level. Tell us about that.

A. It’s an emergency solution that will put 25 million people back to work, end unemployment, jump-start the green economy for the 21st century, and substantively combat climate change. It would put communities in charge of defining what jobs they need. These jobs would be community-based, living-wage, full-time jobs, and would basically run the spectrum of jobs that make communities sustainable — clean manufacturing, local organic agriculture, public transportation, energy-efficient as well as active transportation, and of course clean renewable energy, conservation, weatherization, efficiency.

We would also include teachers, nurses, day care, violence prevention, drug rehabilitation, affordable housing construction, etc., so there would be a spectrum of jobs that make our communities environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable. The cost would be on the order of the first stimulus package, but it would create a whole lot more jobs, because the first stimulus package was largely tax breaks and subsidies for large corporations.

Q.I think a lot of working people feel burned by the green economy because we didn’t see the jobs that people like Van Jones were promising — certainly not right away.

A. It’s not only the green jobs that failed. Obama’s promotion of additional free trade agreements has been devastating to working people. He has not delivered on the Employee Free Choice Act. He has not stood up to the so-called “right to work” states, which actually undermine not only worker pay but also safety on the job.

Obama’s first appointments were Larry Summers, who laid the foundation for Wall Street’s waste, fraud, and abuse. He then went on to appoint Timothy Geithner to be head of the Treasury, who had headed the New York Fed while all that was going on. And then he brought in Jeff Immelt, the king of layoffs and factory closures. The head of GE was brought in to head Obama’s jobs council — the guy who had off-shored more jobs than any single person in America was brought in to head the Obama jobs program.

So it’s no wonder that working people are very skeptical of whatever Obama’s going to propose. And I think vote for him only out of fear. And that’s where Alice Walker comes in again, that the biggest way people give up power is by not knowing they have it.

Q.Last question: How do you travel on the campaign trail? Humvee? Private jet?

A. My dream is to get a veggie-oil bus. I take the train whenever I can. When there’s no choice, I fly, and when we drive, we drive in a Prius. So we don’t just talk the talk, we walk the walk all the way.

The Obama campaign is acting as if it is already in a general-election fight, against a Big Oil-Mitt Romney ticket. In a new ad, President Obama attacks “Big Oil” and Mitt Romney, pushing back against oil-industry campaign ads that accuse Obama of raising gas prices. The front group American Energy Alliance, secretly funded by Koch Industries and other oil giants, is running a $3.6 million ad campaign that criticizes Obama policies that don’t favor the oil-industry agenda. Oil companies have been profiting from American suffering at the gas pump, but they believe they would do even better under a Romney presidency, the new Obama ad argues:

Under President Obama, domestic oil production’s at an eight-year high. So why is Big Oil attacking him? Because he’s fighting to end their tax breaks. He’s raising mileage standards, and doubling renewable energy. In all these fights, Mitt Romney stood with Big Oil, for their tax breaks, attacking higher mileage standards and renewables. So when you see this ad, remember who paid for it and what they want.

Watch the ad:

Because of Citizens United, the spending by Koch-funded front groups on this election is practically unlimited, especially as the oil industry pulls in $200 million more every time the price of gas goes up a penny.

A new document has surfaced [PDF] showing Mitt Romney’s strong support for regulating carbon dioxide in 2003, when he called cap-and-trade “an effective approach” to combating climate change.

The comments were made in a letter from Romney to New York Gov. George Pataki (R) about a regional cooperative system for regulating greenhouse gases. In the letter, Romney agreed with Pataki on the need to “reduce the power plant pollution that is harming our climate.”

But today, in trying to align himself with conservative political backlash against climate science, Romney says “we don’t know” whether humans are warming the planet, and that doing something about the problem “is not the right course for us.”

Thank you for your invitation to embark on a cooperative northeast process to reduce the power plant pollution that is harming our climate. I concur that climate change is beginning to effect on our natural resources and that now is the time to take action toward climate protection. Furthermore, I share your interest in ensuring that the economic and security contributions made by our electricity generating system are not negated by the impact of emissions from that system on the health of our citizens.

As you may know, the commonwealth is making major strides to reduce the environmental impact of our power plants. Specifically, I am making good on my pledge to clean up the six oldest and dirtiest power plants in the state and bring them up to new plant standards for NOx, SOx, mercury and CO2. We are the first state to enact a cap on CO2, implementing regulations that, by 2008, will reduce these emissions by 10%, removing 6,750 tons of Co2 per day. Furthermore, Massachusetts, along with the other New England states and Canadian provinces, has a target of reducing greenhouse gases and improving the efficiency of the grid substantially over the next 20 years.

I believe that our joint work to create a flexible market-based regional cap and trade system could serve as an effective approach to meeting these goals. I am ready to have my staff work with yours to explore how we might design such a system — one that would keep the cost of compliance as low as possible, diversify our fuels, encourage energy efficiency and renewables, and keep our energy dollars in the region. Thank you for your initiative in proposing this project.

Mitt Romney is getting a lot of media attention for his contradictory stances on energy policy. Every week, there’s a new document or quote surfacing from the past that counters all of his current campaign mantras.

This adds to the very long list of dramatic changes to Romney’s energy policy. During his last bid for the presidency in 2007, Romney advocated aggressive fuel efficiency standards, electric vehicles, and public-private partnerships to develop clean energy.

In 2006, Romney said that high gas prices were good for discouraging consumption, explaining that he was “very much in favor of people recognizing that these high gasoline prices are probably here to stay.”

In 2004, Romney introduced a climate protection plan [PDF] for Massachusetts, laying out a “no-regrets policy” for tackling climate change.

By now you’ve surely heard that Mitt Romney’s planned all-inclusive beach resort house in La Jolla will include a car elevator, for cars that need to get to the second floor of the garage but are too tired to take the stairs. Between that and the indelible story about Romney keeping his dog on the roof rack, we’re forced to come to the obvious conclusion: Mitt — or is it M.I.T.T.? — is just genuinely confused about the difference between organic creatures and vehicles.

I would not be the least bit surprised to learn that Romney’s beach-house blueprints also include a car hot tub, a deluxe car bed, and a jumbo-sized car litterbox. The dude is filthy rich, plus he’s a Republican — which means he likes to nuzzle up to suburbia, buy it a big bouquet of parking lots, and promise he’ll care for it even when it gets debilitatingly car-dependent. And he’s got a proven track record of not knowing the difference between living things and objects. I mean, he has a son named “Tagg,” for crying out loud — a tag is something you put on clothes, or on the front window of the dog you want to sell! (Mitt shares this particular affliction with Sarah Palin.)

The Romney campaign says that the “car elevator” is more of a Wallace and Gromit-style contraption for storing cars in spaces too tight to back out of (the above image, of a “pop-up garage” costing $50,000, was bandied around Twitter by Buzzfeed’s Andrew Kaczynski). This seems fishy to me, given that the beach house’s basement alone is going to be large enough to fit my house several times over, and according to Politico the garage will be a split-level dealie with room for four vehicles. But it also doesn’t really change my mind. Clearly, in Mitt’s world, cars are treasured pets that need personal conveyances, and pets are snap-on roof accessories for your station wagon. In a Romney administration, we can surely look forward to the establishment of a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Cars.

Filed under: Election 2012]]>http://grist.org/list/mitt-romney-thinks-pets-are-cars-and-cars-are-pets/feed/0car_elevatorjesszimmermancar_elevatorObama likes Keystone XL nowhttp://grist.org/list/obama-we-are-drilling-all-over-the-place-right-now/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_election2012
http://grist.org/list/obama-we-are-drilling-all-over-the-place-right-now/#commentsThu, 22 Mar 2012 17:02:25 +0000http://grist.org/?p=88734]]>Well, that was nice while it lasted. But despite the fact that domestic oil production doesn’t do a dicky bird to bring down gas prices, President Obama is now paying election-year lip service to the idea of, and I quote, “drilling all over the place.” And even more depressingly, he’s now saying that the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline, which he’d previously opposed, should be “a priority.”

At a campaign stop in Cushing, Okla., which would be the northern end of the pipeline portion, Obama acknowledged that Keystone XL has “generated a lot of controversy” but claimed that it would be beneficial for the U.S. oil supply, helping to solve a bottleneck in getting domestic oil to refineries. Strangely, he doesn’t seem to have mentioned all the spills it could cause, or its disastrous net effect on employment in affected states.

Voters are appalled at President Barack Obama’s handling of gas prices, even though virtually every policy expert in both parties says there’s little a president can do to affect the day-to-day price of fuel in a global market.

Ha ha stupid voters! Where do they get such bad information?

As Politico says, the U.S. president has virtually no control over gas prices. Time’s Bryan Walsh lays it out clearly here (in an entirely factual piece that is nonetheless labeled “viewpoint”). Gas prices are tightly linked to oil prices, which are set by forces over which the U.S. has little control.

This is something that energy experts and analysts are more or less unanimous on. The Initiative on Global Markets gathered a panel of economic experts, from across the professional and ideological spectrum, and asked them to react to this thesis: “Changes in U.S. gasoline prices over the past 10 years have predominantly been due to market factors rather than U.S. federal economic or energy policies.” Some 92 percent agreed. Eight percent were “uncertain.” Not a single one disagreed.

So, just to be clear: Anyone who says the president is responsible for gas prices is either lying or woefully ignorant. This category includes all of the Republican candidates for president, virtually every GOP elected official, many conservative Democrats, legions of conservative and centrist pundits, and occasionally Obama himself.

But we were talking about the public. What explains the public’s ignorance of this basic consensus? Well, let’s turn to an analysis of media coverage of gas prices in January and February, just put out by Media Matters. Who’s been covering gas prices?

Ah. Most coverage has been in the dumbest outlets: cable news channels. Especially Fox. Who’s been speaking to the public in these segments?

Ah. Most comment has been delivered by the dumbest, most mendacious people. And what do they talk about when they talk about gas prices?

What these charts make clear is that there has been a concerted effort on the part of the political right to politicize gas prices, tie them to domestic drilling and fracking, and use them to hurt Obama. Consequently, as a new Pew poll found, opinion is swinging slightly in favor of fossil fuels, mostly among conservatives. (Though it’s worth noting that across parties, majorities of Americans still prefer developing clean energy to developing more fossil fuels.)

Just as bad as misinformation — and even more ubiquitous — is failure on the part of reporters to be, in New York Times ombudsman Arthur Brisbane’s now-infamous term, truth vigilantes. Day after day I read stories about GOP attacks on gas prices and almost never do I see reporters note the simple fact that Republicans are wrong. Obama is not responsible for gas prices. He cannot lower them. This is not an opinion or a “viewpoint,” it’s just what follows from the basic facts of energy production and consumption.

This is what drives me crazy about political media coverage. There are tons of stories on GOP attack strategy and Dem defense strategy and horse-race coverage of who’s up and who’s down. There’s quite a bit of coverage of public opinion. But coverage (or even mention) of the facts, the simple realities of gas and oil prices, is absurdly rare.

Just to pick a recent and not particularly remarkable example, check out this piece in The New York Times‘ Caucus blog. It notes Romney tying high gas prices to Obama’s refusal to drill in the Arctic Refuge and the delay in the Keystone XL pipeline. Then it notes Romney explicitly denying — in fact, professing not even to understand — the idea that tensions with major oil producer Iran, which GOP pols are striving to exacerbate , are having an impact on oil and gas prices.

Then it skips straight into polls and how gas prices are affecting them.

At no point in between does it pause to note that Romney is wrong. He is incorrect, either lying or ignorant. There is no credible energy analyst on the planet who believes that drilling in the Arctic and fast-tracking Keystone would have any discernible effect on U.S. gasoline prices. And it is common knowledge among analysts that tensions with Iran are boosting prices.

Romney is wrong. He’s wrong in a way that is dead easy to fact-check. Yet the reporter doesn’t even think to mention it. Are the merits of Romney’s claims really of no interest to NYT readers?

I see a dozen examples like this a day. Newt Gingrich is getting away with the ludicrous promise that he’ll reduce gas prices to $2.50/gallon, mainly because he knows the political media will cover it as a gambit, a strategy, a poll-mover, but never as a simple matter of fact.

Here’s a thought for Politico: In your article about how dumb voters are, you note that the president can’t control gas prices. Why not also note that fact in stories like this or this or this? Even in Politico’s purported gas-price fact-check piece, the reporter never forthrightly states the central fact that there’s little the president or Congress can do about prices other than encourage efficiency and conservation.

Kudos again to Walsh. Would that other reporters followed his lead, and not just in the “opinion” section. How else is the public supposed to learn the truth?

——

UPDATE: Since I did some media bashing in this post, it’s worth noting that a piece out today from Seth Borenstein and Jack Gillum of Associated Press shows what it looks like when the media does it right. They go back and analyze 36 years worth of U.S. gas prices, cross-reference them against 36 years of U.S. drilling, and find … shock! … no connection at all. They cite experts instead of politicians. They show their work. Why, it’s downright inspiring! And educational. I hope the folks at Fox News read it.

Filed under: Article, Climate & Energy, Election 2012, Energy Policy, Fossil Fuels, Media, Oil, Politics]]>http://grist.org/media/media-produces-laments-public-ignorance-on-gas-prices/feed/0reporter-journalist-180x150drgristreporter-journalistMedia Matters: total coverage of gas prices by outletMedia Matters: who was hosted and quoted on gas pricesMedia Matters: energy policies mentioned in conjunction with gas pricesMedia Matters: percentage of gas price coverage that blames ObamaAbout that record-breaking dead heat in Illinois (no, not the polls)http://grist.org/election-2012/about-that-recordbreaking-dead-heat-in-illinois-no-not-the-polls/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_election2012
http://grist.org/election-2012/about-that-recordbreaking-dead-heat-in-illinois-no-not-the-polls/#commentsTue, 20 Mar 2012 11:00:58 +0000http://grist.org/?p=88213]]>It’s election day in Illinois, and the hottest topic in the Land of Lincoln will — I can forecast with complete confidence — be totally ignored by the GOP challengers.

That would be … the weather. Today may mark the seventh straight day of 80 degree temperatures at O’Hare, something that’s never happened before in March. Or in April, for that matter. “It is extraordinarily rare for climate locations with 100+ year-long periods of records to break records day after day after day,” the local office of the National Weather Service said in a statement Sunday morning, following a Saint Patrick’s Day that shattered 141 years of records.

And the Windy City is not alone. In International Falls, Minn., which threatened suit when a Colorado city tried to steal its “Nation’s Icebox” moniker, the mercury went to 77 degrees on Saturday — which was 42 degrees above average, and 22 degrees above the old record. It’s possible, according to weather historian Christopher Burt, that no station with a century of weather data has ever broken a mark by that much.

Here’s how Jeff Masters, founder of the website WeatherUnderground and probably the internet’s most widely read meteorologist, put it from his Michigan base: “As I stepped out of my front door into the pre-dawn darkness from my home I braced myself for the cold shock of a mid-March morning. It didn’t come. A warm, murky atmosphere, with temperatures in the upper fifties — 30 degrees above normal –greeted me instead. Continuous flashes of heat lightning lit up the horizon, as the atmosphere crackled with the energy of distant thunderstorms. I looked up at the hazy stars above me, flashing in and out of sight as lightning lit up the sky, and thought, this is not the atmosphere I grew up with.”

Indeed — later in the day an F-3 tornado wrecked a swath of homes and businesses just west of Ann Arbor, the earliest such storm Michigan has ever seen. “Never before has such an extended period of extreme and record-breaking warm temperatures affected such a large portion of the U.S. in March, going back to the beginning of record keeping in the late 1800s,” Masters wrote.

For 25 years climatologists have been telling us to expect exactly this kind of weather — such extremes become ever more likely as we warm the planet. It’s not just heat; it’s also drought and flood. Last year, the U.S. suffered through more multi-billion-dollar weather disasters than any other year in history. And it’s not just the U.S. — in 2010, the world’s largest insurance company said there was no way to explain the rapid planetary spike in extreme weather except for global warming.

But here’s the weird part: In our political life, all the storms are about contraception and gas prices. In 1988, presidential candidate George H.W. Bush promised to meet “the greenhouse effect with the White House effect,” and it was considered normal and proper, even though climate science was still in its infancy. Now, even though the science is long since settled, the GOP contenders vie to produce the most clownish possible response. Rick Santorum probably takes the prize — asked about global warming the other day in Mississippi, where he was campaigning with a piece of shale rock to underscore his commitment to endless drilling, his response was: “The dangers of carbon dioxide? Tell that to a plant, how dangerous carbon dioxide is.”

Mitt Romney has been only slightly less ludicrous. His take: “Scientists will figure out 10, 20, 50 years from now” if humans are a significant cause of global warming. In fact, 50 years from now, computer models predict, this kind of March will be nothing abnormal — and summer will be, if not exactly hell, then a remarkably similar temperature.

President Obama? He’s willing to grant that climate change is real, even if he rarely mentions it in public. (The 17-minute Barack Obama: The Movie devotes exactly zero seconds to climate change, which is pretty much precisely the emphasis its received in his first term.) This week he’s off across the country touting his “all-of-the-above” energy policy, posing with drilling rigs.

But at least he noticed what was going on in his hometown. Speaking at a fundraiser at Tyler Perry’s Atlanta home (while Georgia was breaking most of its own early season temperature records), the president said, “It gets you a little nervous about what is happening to global temperatures. When it is 75 degrees in Chicago in the beginning of March, you start thinking.”

In case you were worried imminent action was at hand, however, he quickly added: “On the other hand, I really have enjoyed the nice weather.”

Filed under: Climate & Energy, Election 2012]]>http://grist.org/election-2012/about-that-recordbreaking-dead-heat-in-illinois-no-not-the-polls/feed/0Chicago in MarchgristadminChicago in MarchEarth out of balance: The challenge of controlling corporate greedhttp://grist.org/business-technology/earth-out-of-balance-the-challenge-of-controlling-corporate-greed/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_election2012
http://grist.org/business-technology/earth-out-of-balance-the-challenge-of-controlling-corporate-greed/#commentsFri, 16 Mar 2012 19:33:36 +0000http://grist.org/?p=87878]]>When David Rothkopf came to Grist’s hometown of Seattle in 1999, he was a member of President Clinton’s commerce team, here to spread the gospel of free trade at the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting. You may recall that the delegates didn’t get the warm welcome they might have imagined.

“I remember being at this black tie thing and was talking to Bill Gates … and the Sultan of Brunei walked in,” says Rothkopf, who was clearly impressed with the crowd. “And then a friend of mine walked in and said, ‘Somebody just punched me in the face.’”

Outside, the police had used tear gas to break up nonviolent protests against the WTO, and chaos and riots were spreading through downtown.

When Rothkopf made a return visit this week, we made sure he felt more welcome. (Pretzels! Tap water! The sultan would have felt right at home.) And this time, Rothkopf was singing a tune that might well have gotten him booted from the black tie affairs back in 1999, and put him in solidarity with the people in the streets.

Today, Rothkopf is CEO of both Garten Rothkopf, a global consulting firm that specializes in energy and climate issues, and FP Group, the company that publishes Foreign Policy magazine. He is also a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In his free time, he writes books, most recently Power, Inc., a sharp rebuke of free markets run amok and a loud call for rebalancing public needs and corporate interests.

The message will no doubt be music to the ears of all the “muppets” out there who have recently had their eyeballs ripped out by Wall Street fat cats.

Rothkopf still looks comfortable in a really nice suit — but at times he sounds weirdly like Noam Chomsky. “Corporations were given rights by people to serve society,” he told us, “and the moment they stop serving society, those rights can and should be revoked.”

What happened to this guy? Here are a few excerpts from our conversation that shed a little light on that question — and on a lot of other things happening in the world today:

On why he’s changed his tune on free markets:

As I watched, particularly during the last 10 years, I saw a bunch of alarms go off … By the indicators that people were using, things were going good: The stock market was going up. Companies were having bigger profits than ever. The problem was that people were suffering. Certain indicators like dropout rates in inner city high schools, our educational performance, the fact that our roads and bridges were falling apart — those things didn’t even show up in the mix.

On corporate power:

We’ve gone too far. Should executives receive incentives? Absolutely. Should a CEO be paid 350 times what the average employee makes? I think that’s a little over the top. Should a bank like Bank of America be allowed to grow to be 16 percent of the U.S. [Gross Domestic Product] and if it were to fail it would cause a catastrophe around the world? If it does, it should have to play by another set of rules.

I’m not against the ability of markets to create jobs or to spur innovation. I just think that when that has been done best, there was a regulator someplace, a government someplace — that there was a recognition that corporations do not exist by some divine right, but are in fact given rights by society to advance social objectives.

On financial reforms:

The question in my mind is, whether we will look back at the last [financial] crisis and determine that the worst thing that happened was not that it was too big, but that it was not big enough — that it didn’t motivate us to actually demand the kind of reforms that we need. [The Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act] is the most limp financial reform you could imagine. The government hasn’t even appropriated the funds to enforce it.

We have more too-big-to-fail banks than we did before the crisis. We have more banks engaging in risky behavior and more activity in global derivatives markets than we did before the crisis. We haven’t learned the lesson of the last crisis, and I’m afraid that we will have to have another problem before we address it.

On small government:

I love it when Ron Paul says, “If we get rid of government, freedom will sweep right in.” That’s just not what happens. What happens is that a bunch of elephants stampede in because they’re in a position to take advantage of it. Meanwhile, if you get government out of the way, the people who need government, they don’t have it.

There’s this myth that government doesn’t belong in the marketplace. If that were true, there would be no canals, no railroads, no highways, no internet. The government was a critical partner in many of the biggest innovations in U.S. history.

But if you buy into that for 20 or 30 years, and you say, “smaller government, smaller government programs,” who gets squeezed by that? It’s the cities. And the problem is that, as that happens, it accelerates. Kids drop out of school. Neighborhoods decay. Businesses leave. The tax base goes down. Cops get fired. Teachers get fired. It’s a cycle of pain.

On the similarities between Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party:

I think they’re all the same thing. They’re different people’s reaction to the same issue — I call it the politics of alienation. All of these groups feel like it’s the 1% benefiting at the expense of the 99%. And can you blame them? Last year was the first year of the recovery. Ninety-three percent of the benefits went to the 1%. Seven percent was spread among everybody else. That’s inequitable. That’s a broken system.

On the root of the problem:

All the politicians want to be No. 1. “America must be No. 1. We cannot let China overtake us.” But No. 1 at what? The biggest army in the world? Fat lot of good that’s gonna do anybody. The biggest economy? Fat lot of good that’s gonna do us. We might want the highest quality of life, the happiest people, the best educated people, free lasagna for everybody — I don’t know what the objective is, but I do know that we’re not having that discussion, and that’s where our problem starts.

On President Obama and the 2012 presidential election:

Obama is a mainstream, establishment candidate. Nobody took more money from Wall Street than him. You don’t see him going out and sticking his neck out on some big wacky policy. Even on health care, he laid back, he let the Congress drive where it was going to go, and he embraced the best deal that he could.

He’s done a very mediocre job. I’m not sure that he will do a better job in the second term. But I am absolutely certain that he will do a better job than the alternative.

The Obama administration has learned from history, it seems. They’re not going to sit passively by as their opponents demagogue gas prices. This week they’ve gone on the offensive, with the president giving a series of interviews and speeches, including a major address today at Prince George’s Community College in Largo, Md.

Most of the details from today’s speech were familiar from previous speeches. Obama argued that his administration has substantially increased oil and gas drilling, but that drilling will never be enough to reduce gas prices or make America independent of imported energy. Thus, America needs to invent and build new technologies to produce clean energy and use less energy.

That’s all been said before (though obviously nothing’s wrong with repeating it). There was, however, a new theme in the speech, tying all these points together. I don’t know if it’s entirely new, but I’ve never heard it emphasized as much. And since it’s a theme I’ve been pushing for years (clearly Obama is reading my blog), I was quite gratified to see it.

It’s simply this: the past vs. the future. In his prepared remarks, he said a state of constant vulnerability to events overseas is …

… not the future I want for the United States of America. We can’t allow ourselves to be held hostage to events on the other side of the world. That’s not who we are. In this country, we control our own destiny. We chart our own course. An energy strategy for the last century is one that traps us in the past. What we need now is an all-of-the-above strategy for the 21st century that develops every source of American-made energy — not just oil and gas, but wind power and solar power; biofuels and fuel-efficient cars and trucks that get more miles to the gallon. That’s the future. That’s where I want to take this country.

And again:

The point is, there are always cynics and naysayers who want to do things the same way we’ve always done them. To double down on the same ideas that got us into this mess in the first place. But the only reason we’ve come this far as a nation is because we refuse to stand still. Because we put our faith in the future. Because we are inventors and builders and makers of things. We’re Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. That’s who we are. That’s who we need to be right now.

And again:

Maryland, we know what direction we have to go in. We can let these politicians take us back to an energy strategy for the last century, or we can invest in a serious, sustained, all-of-the-above energy strategy that develops every resource available for the 21st century. That’s the choice we have — the past, or the future. And it’s a choice we have to make.

I’ve been saying this forever. There is no part of the American character more deeply rooted than our belief in the future, that we can build and create and make things better. That belief has taken a battering in the last few decades, but there’s still an immense hunger to recapture that spirit.

That’s the tale Obama is telling: Some politicians want to keep us in the past by subsidizing oil and gas and dismissing advanced energy technologies. I want us to embrace the future.

Now, admittedly, there’s some tension here. It’s a bit tricky to be boasting of oil and gas development one second and touting the brave new green future the next. But let’s not be wonky and literalist about this. Obama is trying to carve out a space for real, sustained support for alternative energy. That’s a tricky task in the current political environment. Once that space is carved out, once there’s widespread enthusiasm of the sort you see now in the German public, then we can revisit fossil policy.

But for now, it’s about reframing, shifting the big-picture debate. This speech is a nice step on that path.

Sorry, not that Al Gore Jr. And not that Al Gore Jr.’s son, Al Gore III. It’s a completely different Al Gore Jr. — one who doesn’t look all that junior.

Albert N. Gore Jr. won the Democratic Senate primary in Mississippi on Tuesday, earning the right to be crushed by incumbent Republican Roger Wicker in November.

This Gore is a retired Methodist minister and Army colonel who completed 91 parachute jumps during a distinguished military career. “He declined to give his age, but said he’s in good health,” reports the Biloxi-Gulfport Sun Herald. The Wall Street Journal‘s Washington Wire blog describes him as “a political newcomer” and notes that he “doesn’t appear to have a campaign website.”

Jokes about the former U.S. vice president of the same first and last name running for the Senate in Mississippi were flying, but the Senate candidate said he believes he’s related to former President Bill Clinton’s vice president, though very distantly. He believes the former vice president’s family and his family parted ways sometime in the early 1800s. His ancestors settled in Mississippi, and the vice president’s in Tennessee, he said.

A: First, we must really understand the natural resources we have and find better ways to make these resources generate energy. This country has a vast network of underground and surface water and all it would take would be one great disaster to ruin our water supply or halt navigation and transportation of goods and services. We need to explore solar and wind power to develop energy efficient buildings, vehicles and manufacturing plants. Petroleum and coal are not renewable resources. Neither is water due to climate change. As the earth becomes more arid, we need to find ways of creating energy that would supply our national needs and perhaps help replenish water and air.

Not bad, huh? Perhaps he deserves an endorsement from the Goracle himself.

Stephen Colbert understands the Republican candidates’ aversion to big words, logic, facts, and critical thinking. That’s why he wants to applaud how good they are at being as dumb as possible as fast as possible without stopping for any reason. Here, he highlights some notable moments where the candidates simplify climate and energy policy issues to the point of ridiculousness. Basically, he’s performing a reductio ad absurdum on their reductios ad absurdum, which isn’t an easy trick.

Santorum: Reducing CO2 is absurd, because CO2 is good for plants. Colbert: “Everyone knows that before industry and cars, Earth had no vegetation. That’s why factories are called plants, okay?”

Romney: Alternative energy is absurd, because you can’t drive a car with a turbine on it. Colbert: “‘If you put a windmill on top of your car, then where does the dog go?”

Gingrich: Algae biofuel is absurd, because come on! Algae! Colbert: “Algae fuel is never going to be able to power the spaceships that will take us to Newt’s completely feasible moon colony.”

Filed under: Election 2012]]>http://grist.org/list/watch-stephen-colbert-yell-at-a-plant-to-make-republicans-look-stupid/feed/0colbert_plantjesszimmermancolbert_plantTop 10 prices we want Newt to lower with his magic wandhttp://grist.org/election-2012/top-10-prices-we-want-newt-to-lower-with-his-magic-wand/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_election2012
http://grist.org/election-2012/top-10-prices-we-want-newt-to-lower-with-his-magic-wand/#commentsFri, 09 Mar 2012 18:11:39 +0000http://grist.org/?p=86675]]>Newt Gingrich promises he’ll lower gas prices to $2.50 a gallon once he gets to the White House. Now that we know he’s in possession of a magic wand that can override global market forces, there are a few other items we’d like to see priced lower.

Space travel
Come on, Newt, you’re supposed to be a big-idea man (and a giant Star Wars geek)! Why just lower the cost of car travel when you could lower the cost of space travel?

Health care
If it were actually affordable, we could all agree to put a stake through the heart of ObamaCare, without leaving poor people defenseless against debilitating health costs. Because you don’t want poor people to be defenseless against debilitating health costs, do you, Newt?

Oh. Well, it would be cool to lower the cost of health care anyway.

NoDoz
If it were cheaper, everyone could avoid embarrassing moments like this. We know fighting Reed Richards day-in-and-day-out takes it out of you, but you gotta stay in the game.

Higher education
This would be a great way for Newt to differentiate himself from the snob-hating Santorum.

Aspirin
There’s been a run on it lately, thanks to the recent discovery of a novel off-label use, so it would be good to make sure the price stays low.

For a while there, Jon Huntsman was the one Republican presidential candidate willing to deliver the straight dope on climate change. “To be clear,” he tweeted in August, “I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.” He even argued that climate skepticism could cost the GOP a victory in November: “The minute that the Republican Party becomes the anti-science party, we have a huge problem. We lose a whole lot of people who would otherwise allow us to win the election in 2012.” Envirospraised Huntsman as the heroically rogue elephant.

Then he joined the herd.

In December, Huntsman told an audience at the Heritage Foundation that the “scientific community owes us more in terms of a better description or explanation” of climate change, and that there is “not enough info right now to be able to formulate policies.”

But has he come to any more clarity on his climate views? We called him up to find out.

—–

Q.You tweeted last summer that you trusted scientists on climate change. But in December, you suggested that the science isn’t very strong. What is your view on human-caused climate change?

A. I’ve always said that I put my belief behind science. When you have 99 of 100 climate scientists who are saying that there is something happening here, [and] we have the National Academy of Sciences basically saying the same thing — that’s where I tend to place my belief.

The comment I made [in December] was that there is confusion in the minds of a lot of Americans about where the science is because of the debate still going on within the scientific community. I do believe that greater clarity is needed on the subject because you can’t get good public policy without clear and consistent and scientifically backed data and climate forecasts.

Q.If 99 of 100 scientists are saying human-caused climate change is real and happening, where is the debate?

A. Well, it hasn’t translated into any kind of action within the political community because you don’t have people on a broad basis who are pushing us because they feel it’s urgent. Like, for example, debt — people are pushing the debt agenda because they see that this nation is drowning in debt. They’re not pushing a clean-energy agenda today because they just don’t see the urgency. The political policy agenda does not move unless it has people who are moving it.

Q.Are you saying the problem lies with climate scientists — that they lack urgency — or that it lies within the political community that is failing to hear the urgent message from scientists?

A. I think in many ways the whole discussion has been eclipsed by the jobs deficit right now. We are in a serious economic hole because we have a jobs deficit. There isn’t a whole lot of bandwidth for anything else.

Q.So, to be clear: The scientific community is doing its job and the political community is just not making room for it.

A. I haven’t heard the scientific community speak with a unified voice in some time on this subject matter. Maybe that’s because, again, it’s taking a backseat to some of these other more urgent issues that are economics related. I’m not following the issue today like I was several years ago.

Q.But climate scientists are saying we have to act immediately, yesterday, to solve this crisis. Do we really have time to wait for the economy to turn around to address it?

A. People running for office are generally a reflection of where they think the electorate is, and right now the electorate wants movement on jobs and on debt and not much else.

But I think the energy sector is going to be critically important to job creation and innovation and competitiveness in the next 25 to 50 years.

Q.You brought Utah into the Western Climate Initiative, and then disavowed the initiative, saying it “hasn’t worked.” Why?

A. Because it lost momentum with the business community, and therefore it lost momentum with the people in many of the Western states. There’s a question in many minds about where climate change is and what the public-policy implications are with respect to that.

Q.In 2007, you did an ad for Environmental Defense calling for a cap on carbon emissions. What do you think we as a nation should do to address climate change?

A. The most important short-term step we could take would be a rapid conversion to natural gas. It’s still a hydrocarbon, but it’s 50 percent better than oil, and it’s a step in the right direction.

Politics is the art of the possible. What is possible in today’s discussion on clean energy? It isn’t a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade scheme — I just have to be honest with you, that is not going to be viable politically. What is viable is a movement more aggressively toward use of natural gas.

Q.But scientists are saying we need solutions that will radically reduce our carbon output, not energy sources that are less bad.

A. It’s a step in the right direction on climate and in terms of energy independence. It’s a whole lot better than just managing the status quo.

Q.Do you still support a cap on carbon emissions?

A. Not if it would stand in the way of getting this economy back on its feet and creating jobs. And I have not yet heard articulated any kind of [carbon-cap] program that would do anything other than hinder our economic rebound.

Q.In the last presidential election year, climate change was almost a bipartisan issue. What has happened in the last four years? How did this issue get so polarized?

A. I don’t hear Democrats talking about it either. I don’t see it on the agenda anywhere. And the No. 1 reason is because we’ve had an economic implosion.

I used to run the Republican Governors Association and we had, almost to a person, Republicans and Democrats alike who were after the same basic solutions [on climate]. And then our economy imploded. That presented a much different reality, and we’re still stuck in that reality.

Q.But it’s more than that. You got bashed for even suggesting that climate scientists might be worth listening to. Why is there such severe pressure on Republican politicians not just to ignore climate science, but to repudiate it?

A. It’s become politicized. It’s been taken out of the scientific realm, and it’s been put in the political realm, sadly enough. People aren’t going to hear out the scientific community until such time as the economy rebounds.

Q.Do you think your position on climate change hurt you during the primary?

A. Oh, it didn’t help at all.

Q.What were some of the most surprising reactions you got from both supporters and skeptics on the campaign trail on the issues of climate and clean energy?

A. There was no desire to talk about it. If it was talked about, it was more in conspiratorial terms, which made it very difficult to have any kind of rational discussion about clean energy and our future.

A. Because I compare that to the transfer of $300 billion a year to the Middle East and other countries from whom we’re importing 60 percent of our oil. If you factor in what taxpayers are footing for deployment of troops overseas and keeping the sea lanes open for oil importation, the cost of gasoline is about $12 to $13 a gallon. That is completely unacceptable. The [tar-sands] alternatives aren’t perfect, but they move us in a direction that I like from a jobs-creation standpoint and from a national-security standpoint.

Q.The hidden costs of carbon emissions could have far more disastrous effects on the national and global economy in the long term.

A. I believe [the tar-sand oil offers] far better economic and security benefits short term to this nation at a time when we desperately need it.

Q.Does America need to have an aggressive climate plan in place if we want to convince other countries like China to address the problem?

A. The Chinese are not going to follow our lead. We can say and do whatever we want and the Chinese and the Indians, Brazilians, and beyond are likely going to move as a bloc of developing countries, to their own rhythm, at a pace that doesn’t harm their emerging industries.

Q.China’s wind and solar companies are thriving, thanks in large part to massive government subsidies. What should the U.S. be doing to compete with Chinese companies?

A. First we have to ensure that they’re engaging in fair trade practices, because there have been instances of unfair dumping of their photovoltaics.

Beyond that, if we are intent on creating jobs and capturing the industries of tomorrow, then clean energy clearly is going to be one of them. It may not evolve at a pace or a speed that some thought possible a few short years ago, but it will evolve. We don’t want China owning the intellectual property rights [to cleantech innovations] and then having a superior connection to economic development in the energy sector. We also want to pursue technology and owning that intellectual property.

Q.What specifically can we do to accelerate the pace of development of our own cleantech innovation? China has set an aggressive national target for renewable energy. You set a renewable target while you were governor of Utah. Do we need a bold national renewable energy goal?

A. I think the states are probably the right place to look at renewable energy standards. And you’ve got to work as regions for purposes of having the right infrastructure to distribute clean energy, a smart-grid system — a group of regional governors figuring out the cross-border issues. And once that discussion begins, there is a role for the federal government to come in. But it’s foolhardy for the federal government to step in and manage something that’s ahead of where the states are ready to go. That would backfire.

Q.Can you foresee a Huntsman 2016 campaign with a strong plank for climate and cleantech?

A. [Laughs.] I have no idea where life’s gonna take me beyond the here and now.

Q.Will there be a critical mass of public support for these issues by 2016?

A. We’ll have to wait and see. I’ve given up making forecasts politically.

Congress is about to lose one of its most progressive environmentalists — and its only vegan. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), who became well-known in liberal circles during his 2004 and 2008 presidential runs, lost the Democratic primary for Ohio’s new 9th congressional district on Tuesday. So come January, he’ll be looking for a new job.

Ohio experienced slower-than-average population growth between 2000 and 2010, so it’s now losing two congressional seats. Republicans gamed the state’s redistricting process to pit Democratic reps against each other. Kucinich ended up running against longtime Rep. Marcy Kaptur and losing. (Kaptur will now face Joe the Plumber in the general election. Yes, really, Joe the Plumber.)

Kucinich is perhaps best known for his outspoken anti-war stance and his call for a Cabinet-level Department of Peace. In his mind, those views are closely linked to his environmental values. Here’s how he described his green platform to Grist in 2007:

As president of the United States, I’m going to shift the entire direction of America. We need to see the connection between global warring and global warming, and it’s oil. Sustainability is the path to peace. … peace means being in harmony with nature. If you’re in harmony with nature, you don’t exploit nature. You don’t ruin the land, you don’t extract the oil, you don’t take the coal out of the earth.

My underlying philosophy is a green philosophy. It means that I’m looking at a total reorganization of the federal government to create a cooperative and synergistic relationship between all departments and administrations for the purpose of greening America.

Sustainability is a principle that must infuse our whole approach to life. And the environmental movement is the path toward that. It’s the key to understanding that the earth and the air and the water provide the precondition for life. Life cannot exist without that. So we need to organize our structures of governance in a way that helps support basic principles for the furtherance of life on this planet. And when there is a collision between those values that support life and economic practices, the economic practices must always yield to protect the environment.

You won’t hear that kind of talk from many — make that any — other members of the U.S. House.

Conservative columnist Ryan James Girdusky describes Kucinich as “the last bleeding-heart liberal in Congress,” an “anti-war, anti–big business, anti–Wall Street, pro-environment, pro–universal health care liberal Democrat who very rarely wavered on principles” — a description that Kucinich himself would surely embrace. Kucinich voted against the Waxman-Markey climate bill in 2009 because he said it was “too weak.”

In recent months, Kucinich flirted with the idea of running for one of three open congressional seats in Washington state, but on Wednesday he ruled that out, saying he was going to serve out the end of his term rather than try to carpetbag up to the Pacific Northwest.

But come next year, Kucinich might start feeling the pull of the Evergreen State. It could be the perfect place to finish writing that vegan diet book he’s been talking about.